5 Tips to Help You Leverage the Power of AI in Course Authoring

An Interview With Vector’s VP of Content Development, Michael Schreiner

In January 2023, ChatGPT, the company that owns OpenAI, an American research laboratory for artificial intelligence (AI), boasted an estimated 100 million active monthly users - a feat that took Instagram two and a half years and TikTok nine months to achieve, respectively.

Even while AI usage is growing in popularity, we’re still at the very beginning of learning what it can do and developers are continuing to test its limits. AI is unique from other forms of technology in several ways, including that it is capable of adapting its own programming so that it becomes more effective and efficient at whatever task it is performing over time - and it can do this without human intervention or assistance. Right now, with specific prompts and often in mere seconds, AI is capable of doing things such as producing written content for essays or papers; synthesizing and summarizing large amounts of data; developing websites; answering detailed questions; adapting and editing video, photo, and audio files; mimicking specific human voices; and creating visual artwork, poetry, and music in the style of other artists, writers, and musicians. AI even just helped medical researchers discover a new type of antibiotic that may help defeat a dangerous superbug - and this is all, truly, just the tip of the iceberg.

AI has the power to shift the way we do almost everything, and there are many practical and ethical questions that must be asked as we explore this new realm of possibilities. It’s particularly exciting to consider how AI can be safely and effectively harnessed to improve the world of education and training. When authoring new eLearning courses, Vector is committed to a rigorous process that ensures we’re providing engaging, dynamic, and, most of all, impactful content for our clients. We are driven by our mission to help our clients make safer, smarter, and better decisions and we are committed to using all the tools we can to help us live out that mission. In this interview with Vector’s Vice President of Content Development, Michael Schreiner, he discusses 5 tips to help you leverage the power of AI in course authoring to ensure that you’re building exceptional, impactful content.

5 Tips to Leverage AI in Course Authoring

1. Protect Your Intellectual Property

“AI is just exploding right now, especially with the advent of ChatGPT.  It is really remarkable how easily you can generate multi-modal content now - everything from text, to audio, to video - all kinds of media.  The biggest problem from my perspective are the intellectual property and trade secret implications we need to wrestle down before we use AI in any revenue-generating products. What we don’t want to do is use AI until there is more clarity here, because if there are legal implications down the road - we don't want to put ourselves in a bad position.  We're just being really careful right now.”

When you feed information into any AI program, it’s important to understand how the material could possibly be used by other entities in the future, or how you may be using material that was created by others. The very nature of large language models like ChatGPT and Bing Chat is that they use vast amounts of data from many different sources to create text-based content, and this could pose real intellectual property risks for your company or others. When using AI to create educational content, make sure you do your research, that you understand how your IP could be used now or in the future, that you know if you can use the IP of others, and that you stay on top of new or changing regulations.

2. Experiment with AI, Then Experiment Some More

Although Vector is not currently using AI to develop courses in a revenue-generating capacity, Vector is exploring the ways that it can help streamline that work, performing tasks like outlining learning objectives and creating content assessments based on those learning objectives. A lot of back-and-forth is necessary between the course author(s) and the AI chatbots to achieve the best results and to begin to grasp the full capability of how AI can supplement and expedite the course creation process.

Michael summarized part of that experimental process for us and explained how AI is best utilized when a person actively engages with it, reviewing what it produces and then adjusting the requests in order to shape the content into a final product that is most effective: “In our experiment, we said [to Bing Chat], ‘Your role is an Instructional Designer. Your task is to summarize this portion of the course, and your instructions are to put this information into paragraph form.’ What we got back was a very nice, very concise summary of that section of the course. We took things a step further and we said, ‘Your role is an expert Instructional Designer. Your task is to create Bloom-style learning objectives for this course … And your instructions are to put the learning objectives in a table and include a column for Bloom's domain for that learning objective.’ The chatbot provided some instructionally appropriate learning objectives along with Bloom’s domain.  The objectives needed to be tweaked, but got us like 90% of the way there. Then we took things a step further and we said, ‘You're still an expert Instructional Designer, but your task now is to create multiple choice assessment questions for each learning objective, and your instructions are to put the questions in a third column in this table. Each learning objective should have at least two assessment questions.’ The output was pretty close, but still needed to be adjusted by a Learning Experience Designer.’”

As is clear from Michael’s experience, including AI in your work process is not about finding an easy way to get out of doing said work. Like any tool, you have to know how to use it effectively, and that takes time and effort. Ultimately, whether or not you choose to use AI in public-facing content at this time, you should still begin experimenting with it. There are many ways that AI can be used to help you generate content for teaching and learning - and the more you experiment with AI through a process of trial and error, the better your results will be and the better you will understand how to get the most out of it.

In addition to well-known AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat, here are some other AI resources you can begin experimenting with today:

• Midjourney - A generative AI program and service created and hosted by a San Francisco-based independent research lab that generates images from natural language descriptions.
• Murf.ai - A tool that transforms text to speech for podcasts, videos, and other narrations with a versatile AI voice generator that uses real people's voices.
• Descript - An all-in-one tool for audio transcription, podcasting, screen recording, and audio and video editing.
• ElevenLabs - Browser-based, AI-assisted text-to-speech software that produces lifelike speech by synthesizing vocal emotion and intonation.
• RunwayML - A platform for artists and media developers to use machine learning tools in intuitive ways without any coding experience for video, audio, and text.
• Adobe Firefly - Image and text effect generator that offers new ways to ideate, create, and communicate while improving creative workflows.

3. Always Fact Check AI-Produced Content

Just because it’s AI doesn’t mean it can’t make mistakes. In fact, AI is currently prone to a very specific kind of mistake that is referred to as hallucinating. When AI hallucinates, it doesn’t just get things wrong - at times, it completely fabricates information, like names and dates, historical events, book plots, and things and people that do not actually exist. That’s why, when using AI chatbots to help you put together learning materials, you must ensure there is proper quality control with the content that is being produced.

“My experience in using AI is that it hallucinates, which means essentially AI can be convincing that it is factually correct about a topic, when it is factually, 100% incorrect. It's really important, especially early on, until these language models get things more correct, that we double check some of the work that they do because they're known to just get it wrong.”

4. Use AI Throughout Your Workflow to Save Time

One of the greatest benefits AI can bring to your course creation process is to help you save valuable time with problem-solving. By making AI part of your general workflow, it is easier to root out issues or mistakes. Michael shares an experience of using an Excel document that was corrupt for some reason that was unknown to him, but, because he had been using Bing Chat in his workflow, the AI was able to explain to him what the issue was and how to correct the error.

“Not only Ed tech, but the workplace in general is going to really benefit from AI to get questions to answers that it typically would have taken a long time to get answers to. For example, most people use Google in the flow of work. Many people will Google a question, and what they get is a list of ten websites, and they have to dig through them all to find an answer, if they find one at all. With AI chatbots, getting to an answer is so much easier because you get answers in plain English. I see AI making people much more efficient by using it in the flow of their normal workday.”

5. Create Clear Policies for Employees on How AI Can Be Used

AI chatbots and tools are so ubiquitous right now that it is important for organizations and educational leaders to develop clear policies for how AI can and should be used in any context. Without a clear, internal regulation, there is a huge margin for potential misuse.

“Many companies are restricting, or forbidding the use of chatbots to protect their IP, such as Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and the list goes on.  Without clear policies, there is a lot of risk.  The last thing we want to do is copy our IP (whether it is content or programming code) into a chatbot, and have the bot train itself on our IP, while at the same time releasing our content into the ether.  We also don’t want to leverage content, even to just generate ideas, when we cannot verify its source.  Bing Chat does a pretty good job of providing sources, so that is a plus. In general, it's really important that companies have a policy on accepted use of AI.”

Stay Ahead So You Don’t Get Left Behind

There is so much to consider when it comes to AI and how it can and should be used, but by learning to adapt and embrace the possibilities of all that AI has to offer with a critical and practical mindset, you can be at the forefront of how EdTech is changing for the good.

“[The proliferation of AI] is going to happen, and there's going to be a huge shift in how we go about doing things in our workplaces, and even in our personal lives. The people that succeed are the ones that figure out how to use it to make themselves more efficient or improve the quality of what they produce.”

From our expert course creators to the engineering team, to the critical feedback delivered by our customer experience teams, everyone at Vector is part of why our courses are so powerful and drive real results. We are excited to look to the future while examining how AI can be used to transform how we approach learning.