A team of instructional designers will present their experiences with a set of custom AI assistants developed to support specific tasks within a course design model. This session will explore the implementation of these tools and reflect on the evolving role of instructional designers in the age of AI.

Background
As generative AI continues to gain popularity across diverse professions, custom AI assistants designed for targeted needs and tasks have emerged as powerful tools due to their tailored functionalities and relatively low barriers of creation (Samuel, 2025). Our team of instructional designers from a large public university developed and piloted a set of ten custom AI assistants, each configured to address distinct instructional design tasks, such as creating course learning objectives, structuring content and activities, developing lecture materials, and drafting project or assignment instructions. These AI assistants were created based on a course design process informed by the Holistic 4D Model of instructional design (Reigeluth & An, 2021). Preliminary feedback from instructors highlighted increased efficiency in course design and valuable new perspectives on course material and activities. Encouraged by these initial results, our team plans to expand the implementation of these assistants in upcoming course projects throughout the 2025-2026 academic year. To capture our evolving experiences and reflections, we will conduct an informal case study to reassess the instructional designer’s role as AI becomes more integrated into course design processes.

Session Structure
Our session will start with a polling of the audience regarding their familiarity with generic vs. custom AI tools for course design. We will then introduce a course design model organized by six milestones (defining, big picture design, prototyping, breadth and depth design, augmentation, and development) and identify the specific tasks where the custom AI assistants were applied. After briefly walking through the inputs and outputs of the AI assistants, we will do a quick demonstration using one assistant to help the audience understand the configuration and interaction in general. 

Next, we will share initial findings based on our self-recorded data of using those AI assistants during course design projects (e.g., which assistant was used, what was the purpose, how was the quality of generated ideas, what was the instructor’s reaction, how were the ideas used in the project, etc.). By the time of this session, we expect to have used five of the ten assistants that focus on course analysis and big picture design in our new projects that start in Fall 2025. We plan to continue collecting data throughout the 2025-2026 academic year and share updates in future conferences. 

Lastly, we will discuss our reflections about the impact of such AI assistants on the course design process, the changes we observe in working with instructors, as well as our visions of how the instructional designers’ role might evolve in the age of AI. We would like to invite the audience to join our discussion and share their experience and thoughts about custom AI assistants. We will also provide links and test input data of the custom AI assistants we created for the audience to interact with at the end of the session. 

Learning Outcomes
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Define custom AI assistants and articulate examples of their application in course design.
• Identify course design tasks that can be effectively supported by custom AI assistants.
• Discuss the evolving role of instructional designers as they integrate custom AI assistants in course design workflows.
• Apply and assess the introduced custom AI assistants in selected course design scenarios.

References

• Reigeluth, C. M., & An, Y. (2021). Merging the instructional design process with learner-centered theory: The Holistic 4D Model. Routledge, New York, NY.
• Samuel, A. (2025, May 15). How to build your own AI assistant. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2025/03/how-to-build-your-own-ai-assistant 

Yan Shen, Ph.D.

Senior Instructional Designer at North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Yan Shen is a senior instructional designer at DELTA. She works with faculty and new media team to design, develop, and evaluate technology-supported learning environments for online, face-to-face, and blended courses. She is interested in designing technology-enhanced scaffolds to develop students’ higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills. She is also interested in evaluating the effects of technology-based instructional interventions on student learning process and outcomes. Before joining DELTA, she received her Ph.D. degree in Learning, Design, and Technology from the University of Georgia.

Jennifer Tagsold, Ph.D.

Instructional Designer at North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Ying-Hsiu Liu, Ph.D.

Instructional Designer at North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Jakia Salam

Lead Instructional Designer at North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Bio: Jakia Salam is a Lead Instructional Designer at DELTA where she works as a project lead and instructional designer for DELTA Grant projects. She works closely with the faculty, media team and video production team to design, develop, and evaluate on-line, hybrid and face-to-face courses.
Jakia holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and completed her Master of Science in Computer Science from UNC Greensboro in 2002. She also obtained a Graduate Certificate in e-learning from the College of Education at NC State in 2013.
Prior to joining DELTA, Jakia worked in various roles including as a Senior Instructional Designer at UNC Chapel Hill, an Instructional Technology Consultant at UNC Greensboro, a full-time faculty at Guilford Technical Community College, a Chemical Engineer and Application Developer.

Christine Cranford, Ph.D.

Instructional Designer at North Carolina State University at Raleigh

Christine Cranford is an instructional designer with Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) at NC State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication from East Carolina University. Christine provides instructional design knowledge to solve instructional challenges and utilize best practices for online course design. As a member of the Course Quality team, she works with faculty to improve the quality of their courses and achieve Quality Matters Certification. Christine’s passion is helping faculty create engaging and effective learning environments.