Explore how AI revolutionizes course development through phase-by-phase strategies. This presentation will show you practical ways to use AI for designing, prototyping, and enhancing high-quality courses. Learn to streamline processes, foster creativity, and improve outcomes for both instructors and students, leveraging generative AI to elevate the educational experience.

IIntroduction and Relevance

As the demand for online and blended learning grows, learning designers face increasing pressure to develop high-quality, engaging courses quickly and efficiently. Generative AI (GenAI) can be a powerful tool, helping to streamline the course development process while fostering creativity, inclusivity, and innovation.

In this session, we will explore the potential integration of GenAI tools such as GenAI chatbots, Vyond, and Canva into various phases of learning design. This presentation will follow our department’s development phases, modeled after the ADDIE framework, and will discuss how GenAI can be integrated into this process seamlessly from start to finish. This course outline highlights instructional challenges common across disciplines, such as maintaining instructor presence, fostering online community building, and incorporating real-world examples. By showcasing how GenAI can help address these challenges, participants will gain practical strategies to enhance their own course development processes.

Our approach to integrating GenAI into course development is collaborative, ensuring that generative AI tools are used in partnership with and with the approval of faculty. This collaboration guarantees that GenAI complements the expertise of our educators, aligning with their vision and maintaining academic integrity. Faculty are fully involved in the design process, guiding how GenAI assists in creating engaging, high-quality learning experiences.

This session is particularly relevant for educators, designers, and curriculum developers seeking innovative ways to address the growing complexity of online learning environments while ensuring that courses are inclusive, accessible, and engaging for all learners.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to 1) identify how GenAI can be used to optimize various stages of the learning design process and 2) apply practical GenAI tools to common instructional challenges, such as enhancing instructor presence and building online communities.

This session will show use cases of GenAI tools applied to specific instructional challenges, providing participants with an interactive and practical learning experience. The examples will focus on three key areas:

Instructor Presence: We will show how GenAI tools like chatbots can help generate personalized feedback, announcements, and content, enabling instructors to maintain a strong presence in online environments.

Online Community Building: AI-generated prompts and peer-review workflows will demonstrate how GenAI can facilitate student collaboration and interaction, which is crucial for building a sense of community in online courses.

Real-World Application: Attendees will see how GenAI can generate scenario-based learning activities and case studies to help students connect theoretical concepts to real-world applications.

Phase 1: Pre-Design: In the pre-design phase, GenAI tools, like ChatGPT and Copilot, assist learning designers by refining and enhancing learning outcomes based on prior courses or assignments. These tools align course-level and module-level learning outcomes, ensuring they are integrated seamlessly with course materials, activities, and assessments. We will show how these tools can aid in crafting specific learning outcomes tailored to the course content and help create announcement templates for instructors to use to keep students informed and engaged.

Phase 2: Curriculum Design: During the curriculum design phase, GenAI can be used to review and analyze course assignments, making suggestions on how to incorporate AI tools to enhance student engagement. For example, generative AI chatbots can help generate grading rubrics or criteria based on detailed instructions from instructors, ensuring clarity in grading expectations. GenAI can be integrated by students helping to provide feedback on writing, suggesting improvements, and guiding students through a peer-review process to further refine their coursework based on what the student is looking for.

Phase 3: Prototype: Once the draft course build has been created, we can use GenAI to help assess the alignment of the course with our internal standard rubric, offering suggestions on areas that still need improvement. This can help us identify gaps in the course and propose strategies for improvement, such as increasing interactivity or refining content clarity. We’ll show how GenAI can provide design suggestions to meet our high-quality standards, helping to ensure that the course achieves educational excellence and fosters deeper student engagement.

Phase 4: Media Creation: GenAI can play a key role in media creation by automating the generation of assets such as videos, graphics, and other multimedia elements. Tools like Vyond can create video outlines from provided scripts, while platforms like Adobe Express and Canva can generate icons and graphics to complement course content. Using GenAI to help support time-intensive tasks allows us to focus on creating content that aligns with the stated learning outcomes and elevates the online learning experience. In the public speaking case study, we’ll show how AI-generated media can enhance students' understanding course concepts and amplify designer-created course content.

Phase 5: Quality Review: In the quality review phase, GenAI can assist with refining final feedback and ensuring course materials meet quality standards. By analyzing the course for alignment with learning outcomes and providing insights on improving engagement and inclusivity. GenAI can help provide clear, concise, and constructive feedback on the course for future improvements when it comes through for a refresh. Additionally, we’re able to utilize GenAI to ensure course materials are accessible to all learners, regardless of their backgrounds or abilities.

Conclusion: GenAI has the potential to revolutionize learning design in online and blended learning environments by streamlining workflows, enhancing creativity, and improving course quality. This session will provide practical examples of using generative GenAI for developmental support, which participants can immediately apply to their own work. By empowering participants to consider GenAI in their course design, we aim to foster more inclusive, engaging, and innovative learning environments, shaping the future of education through digital empowerment and creativity.