ILOTA Things: Episode 7 - AI for Educators - AI Plus One (Course Revision and Planning)

Welcome to ILOTA Things, the ADCET podcast where we explore Inclusive Learning Opportunities through AI.

In this episode, titled AI for Educators - AI Plus One (Course Revision and Planning), we're going to dive into the ability of AI and other tools in assisting educators in planning, renewing and creating course content while creating opportunities through UDL for improving accessibility and inclusion. 

More information including episode notes and links are available on the ADCET website.

Transcript

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Announcer: Welcome to ILOTA Things, the ADCET podcast where we explore Inclusive Learning Opportunities through AI. In this series, we'll explore the exciting convergence of universal design for learning, UDL, artificial intelligence, AI, and accessibility, and examine ways in which we can utilise emerging technologies to enhance learning opportunities for educational designers, educators, and students. Now, here are your hosts, Darren, Elizabeth, and Joe. 

Joe: Hello and welcome from whenever, wherever and however you're joining us and thank you for your time as we investigate ILOTA Things, that is, Inclusive Learning Opportunities Through AI. My name is Joe Houghton, and joining me once more on our artificial intelligence, universal design and accessibility rocket ship are my co co-hosts Elizabeth Hitches,

Elizabeth: Hi there.

Joe: and Darren Britten,

Darren:  Hello everyone. 

Joe: Today's episode is titled AI for Educators,  AI plus one - course revision and planning. So, we're going to take a look at how AI can assist educators in planning, creating and renewing course content, all the while making it more accessible and inclusive. And I don't know about everybody who's listening, but I'm facing into my new semester, which is heading towards me pretty quickly, so this is probably something that's fairly current for many people at the moment. So what kind of challenges are faced by educators, what kind of opportunities do some of the new AI tools offer us, and how are we going to fold that into UDL and accessibility? So let's start with that. Let's start with the UDL and accessibility end of things, and let's throw to Elizabeth and get an insight into how does developing content with AI fit into UDL and accessibility.

Elizabeth: Thanks, Joe. So I'm going to start thinking with the challenges faced by everybody, using AI or not. You know we may inherit a course or we might be developing a course or a unit from scratch, and it's a process of iterative revisions. So quite often we'll make a set of changes across one semester and then hopefully, if we're listening to student feedback, we might be identifying barriers that remain and then really working to make it more inclusive and more accessible the next time around and keep learning from that process of implementing that learning experience and seeing how students respond and what we need to be doing better the next time. So I've just gone through that process in a unit that I'm involved in with Stuart Woodcock at Griffith University and we're really looking at how UDL plays a fundamental part in delivering that learning and making it a really inclusive learning experience for all of our learners.

So I think one of the challenges around implementing UDL or implementing accessibility can come down to how much of this information has already come across our table. So I feel somewhat lucky that I've come through an education lens or an education education, so learning about UDL has definitely been a key part of that. A lot of the work around accessibility wasn't part of that training and is something that I've gone to train myself in or sought out those professional development opportunities. And so I think there can be a really big challenge with this just not coming across people's tables, maybe not being reached by that UDL conversation or not having an awareness of where even some of our resources might present accessibility barriers and you don't know what you don't know until you come across that information or somebody points it out and says I'm using a screen reader and the ordering on these slides it's reading the content before the titles and it's reading it back to front. But many people, that can be the first experience of understanding that there are some accessibility aspects, even to PowerPoint presentations or even to our Word documents that we can really reduce the barriers to and we can consider. So that'd be the first challenge is how do we make sure that in the time available, with the resources available, people are learning about their role in UDL and accessibility, having that workloaded into that professional process, understanding that it is a plus one approach that we may want to do everything, but we may not know everything about what's happening in that course yet. So how do we iteratively draw on our own understanding and students' feedback to keep developing it. 

Now, when we take that across to the lens of AI, how do we actually use AI to fit into this process? I think we're seeing challenges at the moment with understanding how AI can actually fit into and support that process. There are also changing positions of universities on what AI is acceptable and not acceptable, how the data is going to be stored because you think you know all of those resources that we create for courses, that is intellectual property and if it goes into a system that then trains that system or draws on it and spits out aspects to other people, is that safe and acceptable? There are all sorts of aspects of university policy that are changing on that and very recently I saw a particular university that had accepted a particular AI initially and had then decided that actually because of a policy change with that AI company, that it no longer fit with the safety protocols or the values of that particular university and so they've actually said this is not something that our university is going to be using. 

So it's challenging keeping up with that AI space and knowing how we can use it, where we can use it and do so safely and ethically. And you know, circling back to that idea of accessibility, I'd love to throw to Darren now and think about this from the student's perspective.

Darren: Yeah, look, thanks Elizabeth. And, as you mentioned, like the iterative approach, which is more common than not, we don't, you know, academics don't have, you know, this swag of time or this special magic bag of extra time all of a sudden to go through and fully renew their content. It will be in dribs and drabs, as time allows and particularly, as you're saying, ideally focused on that student feedback, um, that's there. So you know I often get the question well, how can I help with this? You can always just ask AI as well. You can ask some of those bots. So, if you know, students have given feedback on this, what's some ways that I can make this more accessible? What's some ways that I can, do x using a UDL approach? Um, and it can give you some feedback on that and get you started at least into a realm. So you don't necessarily have to wait for somebody else to go and at least start having that conversation, even through to look at that and say students have given me feedback on this, how can I best look at this? That fits with an overall redesign, because what the feedback they gave was very specific, but they wanted to, as you should, should with you. How is this going to be useful for everybody, rather than me doing some really individualistic adjustments, um, that are there. Coupled with that also, and if you're taking that time to review, look at those things which were individual adjustments and how can you ideally remove them next time. You know, so where I had to make these reasonable adjustments for an individual this time around, how can I make it that that adjustment is there for everybody ideally, and that could be even some little things through to time that's set there for quizzes or for exams and saying, well, if there's an extra half an hour required for X number of students, why don't I just give everybody an extra half an hour? Same size for everybody. You can still finish the quiz or the exam in two hours, but if you're given two and a half, you don't need the extra half an hour. If you do need the extra half an hour, it's there for everybody. So one size kind of fits all or accommodates all, should I say rather than fits all, can be certainly a much better approach.

But there's also that opportunity to look at. You know from that student feedback you know where were the barriers during semester to some of that knowledge. Where did things have to be repeated or rephrased or, you know looked at from a different lens to do there and say how can we add in some scaffolding to reduce that next time? So it may not be changing the content you've got, it's just bridging the content you've got. 

If you've already got content from weeks one, two, three, four, five, some of those lectures recording that you may still be using all those videos, you could use those transcripts and use AI to give you some really short, sharp dot point summaries you can use in week two saying in week one we looked at, you know, as a quick summary in this week we're going to look at. So you're doing that forewarning and previewing. You know some information that's there for that student that may have missed the lecture that week or is still catching up to date to know where are we at, where are we going, you know, from week to week. And so, Joe, I'll probably pick on you a bit here with this, but as someone who uses AI, you know in their classroom, and how have you found using AI,  does it reduce or increase time for you and or your students? 

Joe: It's interesting, isn't it? Because I mean there was, I was always taught kind of it's three hours of prep per hour of delivery. You know roughly um, and I don't know where, I don't know where that number comes from, but it's always been pretty kind of solid as far as I could see. You know putting a course together and then redoing a course after you've run it once or twice. You know taking feedback, taking input from what you've done and stuff.

There's a lot of time goes into developing a session. Um, I don't know that AI has dramatically speeded up my creation process when I'm putting a new module together, for instance, but I think what it is doing is it's probably allowing me to consult and embed a lot more wider sources of information. I can do bigger research, if you like, in the same time than I could have done previously. So I mean it might be useful if I just go through my process perhaps of creating a new session, yeah, and then you two pick that apart and add to it from, you know, the different perspectives and whatever, yeah, so so I'm putting this out here now, okay. So yeah, let's, uh, let's just turn the covers over and and show people behind behind the mask.

Darren:  We've got very much a glimpse behind the curtain here, people. Thank you for doing this, Joe. This is very honest and open of you.

Joe:  Okay, so I've got to put together a new session. I've got a talk coming up on using AI for assessment. Okay, so you know if we used something like that. Okay, so I sit down at the computer and I do sit down at the computer. I mean, everything is in the computer. I know, not everybody starts there. And the first thing that I that I write down is who, what and why. Okay, so you always start with your audience. Who are my audience? Okay, what do they need to know about this? What are they coming needing to know? What do I need to give them so that, at the end of our engagement whether that's an hours webinar or whether that's a 12-week course that they are in some way better than they were before to take that information and do things with it. Yeah, because I tend to be quite an applied practitioner. You know, I'm teaching project management, I'm teaching assessment, I'm teaching stuff that people are then going to do, rather than just teaching knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. So I try and define my audience and you know, from marketing, we use things like user personas and stuff like that, so I'll write down two or three user personas. I'll write down and clarify who it is that I'm talking to, who it is that I'm interacting with. 

It's interesting, we've just had an update to Brightspace at my university. I saw it come through from the teaching and learning people and I noticed that they're still calling our teaching sessions lectures. And I actually wrote back to them and I said is this not a bit 19th century? Yeah, but we're still in the latest iteration of our kind of best practice teaching and learning, you know, calling lectures lectures. Because I don't call them lectures anymore, I call them sessions because it's time when we come together and it's not me lecturing hopefully there's a bit of that perhaps but there's also the discussion, there's the exploration, there's the go off and play with this and come back and present what you thought and you know, let's, let's share this journey together.

So so start with your audience. And when you've got an idea of what they, who and what they need and what they want, then the second question that I ask is why will this be useful for you? Because I think, if you contextualize that at the start of a teaching kind of engagement, it links people up, because people can now make the jump from oh, we've got to talk about assessment today, you know, to oh, that's useful to me because I've actually got to create new assessments this semester or stuff like that. Okay, right, so now I'm in. Yeah, okay, so that's good. So then the next thing that I do is I actually get out my notebook and a pen or a pencil very often and I brainstorm key things that I think need to be included in the session on paper, and sometimes I literally do it on paper. Very often I'll just type them into a Word doc or into a Notion doc or whatever, because I know I'm going to have to get them onto the computer at some point. But I'm using my knowledge, you know, and hopefully in in some of the domains that I'm involved in, that's expert knowledge, but it might not be. You know, I might be not be particularly expert in this domain, but there's certain things that I've immediately got coming out that I think, yes, I need to cover that, I need to cover, I need to cover that, I need to cover that, I need to cover that. So, use your own knowledge and, I think, trying to get the most out of AI without being a domain expert or having some domain knowledge is very, very dangerous. Now I've talked enough. We can come back to the rest of my process in a minute. Okay, but that's probably thrown a couple of things up for you two. So, Elizabeth, you've got your hand up, so what's coming out so far?

Elizabeth: Soon as you said, you know we need to have that expert lens on what comes out I just thought this is a great moment to throw back to an example from a previous podcast where we were discussing some things in the news or in the media about, you know what AI had actually said and you know having a bit of a giggle that it was telling people to eat a small rock a day or to put glue on their pizza. And you know we were saying in that episode we can laugh about that because we know that that's probably not the best advice, and so you know it's quite comical that it would actually be suggested.

But if we are working in a field where maybe we are not a subject matter expert, even really subtle differences in knowledge and understanding or misunderstandings, they could be easily missed. And so, while we might be able to pick up, yes, we should not eat a small rock a day. That's something we shouldn't do. And, okay, I'm probably not going to put glue on my pizza.

What if it told me that UDL was an exclusionary framework or that when using UDL, I should separate one student off into the corner with their own individualized task, while the rest of my classroom and I do something different and that's how students get what they need. You know, from that inclusion perspective, we'd be looking at that going actually, you know it's about options and this should be seamlessly integrated. We shouldn't be having micro exclusion within our classroom. That's not going to contribute to an inclusive field. But without that understanding, we wouldn't actually know and question that. I think that's just a really great point. I wanted to really highlight from Joe there, just to keep that in mind, that we do need that expert lens or that subject matter lens on what's being developed.

Darren:  And that's so true and I think it's also true for students as well. It's the nature of that prompt that you put in there and the information you put in. But even from cases with some students that have been using AI, that I've been working with that, getting them to put in even some help around using the computer and various tasks and organizing and they say well, you can ask, let's ask ChatGPT that, and they'll ask something very specific when are the most settings to do this? And you go to do this on what computer are you using? What version of the software are you using? So you can ask it how do I find this in Windows? And there's been many, many, many iterations of Windows and sub versions and it will give different responses because it's slightly different on every version of the platform. So they can instantly jump in and start going. Oh, okay, here's the response I need, here's the information that I'm after, but it's very contextualized or not contextualized, because they didn't specify. So, asking for this, for Windows 11, for this. Oh, here's where I go. I go to settings, I do this, I make this adjustment. Yes, it is where it says it is, Otherwise they go, it's all lies. None of that's true, it is. You just didn't specify which version you needed to look at. 

So, again, being very specific about what you're asking, and the same is true. I've had those conversations with some Ed designers putting that context in when asking for an image description In what context do you want this described? How are you using the image? All of those things. It will give you different responses and, Joe, you've had experience with this as well.

Joe: Yeah, I mean, you know this thing of context. I mean it takes us back to those first three questions, doesn't it? You know who, what, why? Yeah, and I think this is why you need to start with that, because it establishes a context, it establishes almost a set of ground rules. It establishes a playing field that you're on that you then that you then start to expand on and build on in a way that then your learners understand this is where we are and this is what we're going to do, and this is why we're going to do it. Okay, and within that context, we're going to do these certain things. But outside of that context, there's it doesn't mean there's not other relevant stuff that we haven't explored today or whatever that perhaps is, but here's our playing field for today, and I find that a lot of learners need some kind of a playing field mentally. You know, if you just throw stuff at them and it's scattergun, and this lands over there and this lands in front of them and this lands behind them, it's like, oh right, these are all interesting factoids, they're all interesting dots of information, but I haven't got a map, I haven't got a way of connecting them all. So I think that's really, really important. So we've brainstormed ideas on paper or into into Word, or, you know, notion or whatever it is.

Um, what I then do is I will take my brainstormed ideas and I will take the brief. So very often I've got a brief from maybe a client or from you know, a curriculum or whatever. You know that I need to cover this kind of stuff to this level for this type of an exam, or you know whatever it is. And then I will put those two sets of information into multiple AIs and I stress the word multiple AIs, because what I want is different voices, I want different kind of, you know, inputs. So I'll put this into chatGPT and I'll say give me some other ideas of what I should include in this session to keep this up to date, to keep this current, to address the what and the why and the how. Yeah, but within the guidelines of the curriculum guardrails that we've got.

What I also do, and I do this with as many of the AIs as I can before I even start this process, but if not, you need to include this in the prompt is set your AI tools up to be cognisant of UDL, accessibility, inclusivity, global examples, this kind of thing. So in my chat GPT custom instructions, for instance, I have lines that say you know, embed everything in the concepts of UDL, of inclusivity, of accessibility when creating examples, draw examples from all around the world, draw examples from different cultures other than Irish, middle-class white culture, which is where I am, and it's amazing, because I get stuff from different kind of perspectives that I didn't get otherwise. So, if you've got the ability and I think Claude gives us some of that now, chatGPT has given it for a long time. Not all of them do, though. Are either of you two doing similar things when you're interrogating your AIs? How are you, how do you use your expertise, your domain knowledge expertise, or do you force your AIs back into UDL and accessibility?

Darren: Yeah, not necessarily putting it directly in so that it's there with every query. And I suppose I try, where I can, to practice what I preach when I'm talking to students about being specific in terms of making sure that that's in the prompt that you're putting in there, so that you can end up with quite a long prompt that's there. So I get them to try and start from a very simple prompt, then expand that prompt, then ask for more or less detail within that prompt then or within this context, or can you also reference where this fits within UDL? Can you do et cetera, not that a student's necessarily thinking about UDL, but in the sense of build it as you go for what you need, because you may need to swap that out later for something else.

Again, if you're doing repetition and a lot of things that you need to put in, having that framework built in, as you were saying, that structure that's already there so I don't have to ask it every single time, is really useful. But definitely, from working with students, I'm getting them to not put in and forget and then just assume the system's always going to do this, but to really think and critically look at what am I asking and what am I expecting back? And does it meet that expectation or not? Elizabeth, you know, I suppose same question to you then, you know, are you setting things up with those things in mind?

Elizabeth: In terms of course design, I'm running purely on my own brain and the brain of colleagues and from student feedback, and I think for me one of the benefits in doing that, particularly with the new UDL 3.0 framework, is that's the way that I learn best, and so you know, if I'm really deeply engaging with that framework and really wanting to learn the intricacies of those new aspects that have been incorporated, I'm getting great joy out of actually engaging with that framework myself. So I haven't yet been using AI in course design specifically, but you know, even hearing from Joe's process here about you know starting with that that initial human brainstorm, and then using AI to further develop that, and you know, further elaborate on that I think that's a really interesting process and one that I hadn't yet considered because I've been running purely on brain power and course design. But I could imagine there'd be so many new things that might pop up if AI could then build on that and take that further and show me perspectives that I haven't considered or had access to. 

And so one of the things I actually wanted to ask either Joe or Darren either of you, I've been wondering about this how quickly is the AI updating? We've got the UDL 3.0 guidelines? Have you noticed the AI incorporating UDL 3.0? Or have you noticed some of the 2.2, 2.0, one of those frameworks popping up? 

Joe: If you don't specify what you're looking for, and this goes back to Darren's point earlier on, it's still pulling up by default. You know most of the AIs are still pulling up earlier versions of the UDL framework and I think that's probably because they're better searched. You know they're higher ranked at the moment on Google because they've been around for a while, so there's lots of material on them. But if you change your prompt and say I want you to specifically reference the UDL 3.0 guidelines released in August 2024, then it seems to be pretty good at going to the CAST website because that's about the only place that it exists yet you know out there and actually referencing the new guidelines. So I have seen that. Yes, I don't know, Darren, have you played with that at all yet?

Darren: Yeah, look, I've tried, I think, twice now, with referencing and saying UDL 3. Once it gave me back this long story about UDL 3. I mean, that's not what I actually asked you because I think it was still just a bit too new and it was referencing the new guidelines are coming. And if we build in that awareness again, with that context that we're talking about, what am I actually asking and what do I want it to do, then you can interrogate that information it gives you back a bit more and it may not give you the exact thing, but then you know what to look for in there or you give it a slightly different prompt, or do you start with the using UDL3 principles that are there, rather than some very specific parts to try and get what's there and still then go and match those bits against the three guidelines for the parts that are there.

Look and that's true of a whole range of things you ask for legislation around some things. For which version of the legislation? If something's from the government's just recently been updated, um, I want to reference in Australia, like Disability Standards for Education, or I want to reference, you know, the DDA, which version are we talking about? Um, that's in there, and they're the responses that you'll get back.

Joe: Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it  because even though we're domain experts, we're not domain, we're not domain experts in everything. So you may not be aware that CAST has just been updated to 3.0 or that, you know, WCAG has gone to the latest release or whatever it is. So this is another of the questions that I have in my kind of process yeah is, as I'm going through my my structure and stuff, I will say, okay, what guidelines should be informing this session? And it might come up with WCAG, or it may come up with, you know, UDL Cast 3.0, or it may come up with something that I've never heard of, you know, and maybe I've never come across ADDIE, or I've never come across Bloom's taxonomy, or whatever it is. Yeah, and all of a sudden I get to go and look at that and think, oh actually, yeah, this seems to apply and I'll fit this in and make this part of the process. So asking AIs for relevant frameworks and models can also be really, really interesting, because then that lets you reframe sometimes what you're presenting or sharing, or whatever you know, in a way that is then contextually relevant, based on research rather than just on what you think, which is generally quite a good idea. 

So we're brainstorming, using multiple AIs to get multiple instances and as I get information, I'm copying this into, generally a Word doc or a Notion doc. Okay, Notion tends to now be my playground of choice, just to squirrel information away and start moving it around and putting it into a structure. And then once I've kind of got a structure that I'm reasonably happy with whether I'm writing a book, I start with a table of contents. If it's a teaching session, there's an introduction, there's three sections and there's an end. You know and then you're building in things like breakout rooms and discussion points, and you know delivering information and this kind of stuff. So then you start to source references.

So you need, you need to now take the information that you're going to present to them and say right now, give me some, give me some credible sources of information that support this. And sometimes you'll find that there isn't any. Yeah, I did a session a few weeks ago and one of the things that one of the AIs came up with was learning styles, and it said oh, yes, you should use learning styles, yeah, and now I know that learning styles have been debunked. But if I wasn't a domain level expert, I would have just taken that as something that I should be covering. But you know, I put learning styles in and I said is this credible, is this kind of supported by current research or whatever? And immediately it came back and well, actually, no, there's a lot of discussion about this and you know it doesn't really seem to be supported, and all the rest of it. So you've got to go and check and you cannot yet believe anything the AI tells you without going and checking it. Hallucinations are real, okay, whether it's you know whether it's Halloween or not, we've got to be very, very careful because the stuff that AI tells us is true is still not always true. It's getting better, but it's not there yet, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's having these issues around the AI. I've got a story to share in a little while, but I think Elizabeth's got a story as well.

Elizabeth: Thinking about um, even the, the research perspective around education, where um practice is really shared in that hopefully really evidence-based way. I do know of some colleagues who have come across either papers that were being reviewed or have actually gone to a particular conference and within that what's meant to be a really thorough piece of literature and thought-out work, they've actually noted that there have been false references within it and it's become apparent that the person has used AI to actually generate that material and that AI has hallucinated particular academic references that don't exist, and that's actually been one of the telltale signs that this piece of literature or evidence is actually possibly fabricated and may not have actually been really thoroughly thought through at all. So, yeah, a really great point to think through there. And you know, if you see things coming up in students' assessments and you see, you know that sounds like a really great paper and it doesn't exist, that might be why.

Joe: And I mean this is one of the things that I actually put in my student brief now for kind of assessment, and I mean I don't do exams, it's mostly project-based learning and stuff. So it's not particularly, you know, I'm not setting them a 5,000 word essay to write and they can just feed it into chatGPT. But I tell them I say I expect all your references to be checked and I'm going to check references at random and if I find any that are not real, that's going to be a hit, you know, on the marking because it will it'll be an indicator that you've not checked your work and stuff like that. I came across a new tool yesterday and it was interesting because it seems to have been developed by, I think the CEO is dyslexic, so I was doing some just general research around accessibility and this new tool came up. It's a new AI called Vnote. So the URL is https://app.vnote.ai and it's it gives you a kind of dialogic interface. So it's set up to allow you, rather than having to type everything, yeah, it's set up to make it very, very easy for you to interact with it using your voice, and it's very good at picking up exactly what you say and then translating that into the text and then letting you create new content but also edit existing content that you've got. So you can say, well, rewrite section three for me, but with more emphasis on X, and it'll regenerate the whole document, but rewrite section three for you and stuff. 

So it's got some really, really good features and from an accessibility point of view, it seems to be quite a nice tool to start using. It's an early tool, okay, so it's not very well developed yet, but it was interesting because I said to it, it gave me a list of books and articles for further reading, and I said will you include the three books by Joe Houghton on AI and UDL and accessibility? They're on Amazon. So it popped in Joe Houghton has written three books on AI, accessibility and UDL. Yeah, and it made up three completely fictional books. So it got the right number of books, yeah, but they weren't the books that I wrote. So you do have to be very careful because even you know, and it looks so good when it comes up on paper, doesn't it? You know it's on the computer, it must be true, and so many people still fall into this trap, so we do have to be very careful. So you've got to check your sources. Now there's some very good tools out there. Consensus is a good tool for, you know, incredible sourcing of information, Elicit, Research, Rabbit these are all very good tools for kind of academic research. So use a few of those tools to find good sources for the points that you're making, because that obviously makes your presentation much more credible.

Darren: Look, and I think it's really important, as you're saying, to make that credible, but also, as you specified earlier, to look at things from different perspectives. What are some of those counterpoints and arguments to some of the things you've got there? Students will find these as well and question on, hang on, you spoke about this, but this says this. Yes, okay, that's the world we live in, there are counter views to some things, there's certain truths, there's things that change from that as well. So being able to challenge those assumptions, I was talking with an Ed designer about, you know, putting in the intended learning outcomes and saying can you, you know, rephrase this so that it can meet the intended learning outcomes, which are X, Y, Z, you know, here's the three ones that we want from this. Does this assessment help meet these? Oh no, because you didn’t ask for this. Again, being really specific about what you're putting in there can really help reframe what's there, because you can become blind. I deal with some Educational designers because they're doing the rinse, repeat work, rinse, repeat work, you know, but not as a subject matter expert necessarily, you know. So they can take it so far, then have to refer it back to, as you're saying, that domain expert to say does this now fit with this. So some of that work you know can still be done by others as well in part of that course renewal and planning, and then put that back to the experts saying, look, we've had a chance to renew and remould some of this content, to add a bit more context either side, to add some other pathways and structures in. Does this still fit with the overall?, and there's some counter narratives that came up from last time. Well, there was discussions in the discussion board people saying, but what about X's point of view? What about Y? What about these female perspectives that weren't covered? You know this is fairly gender biased in the resources that you've got and things like that, that can certainly help in providing you know a bigger list of things that are there. And, Joe, you've probably come across those things as well.

Joe: Yeah, I have and I mean that takes me beautifully into the next point in my kind of process, which is to run the draft past two or three other educators and students. So I, you know, and I routinely do this I'll create a draft and I will send it to two or three other people and I will say will you just have a look at this and pick it apart for me? Will you tell me what occurs to you that isn't in there, that I might add in, or is there anything you disagree with? You know, and I'll send, I'll send a few kind of trigger questions like that along with the draft, uh, and just ask for input and feedback. Now, you're going to get that the first time you run your module anyway, because you'll get that back from the students in terms of their questions and the way that they, they interact and, you know, react to the material. But doing that ahead of time as well, you know, I mean, it goes back…I was, I was trained a long time ago in design thinking and you know it's kind of like the empathize stage in design thinking, isn't it? You go off and you, you ask your audience what they, what they actually want, rather than assuming that you know what they want, um and I think I mean that has lots, of, lots of linkage into UDL. Elizabeth, is that sparking anything off for you?

Elizabeth: It really is, and I think we're in a in a stage where we're starting to see some more work around student voice and student perspectives, but that literature is still thin on the ground in many different domains. And so you know, how do we elevate that student voice, how do we make visible those barriers that may not be visible without hearing those student experiences, and how do you make that a really safe and accessible experience for students? Now you can imagine that maybe you've got a feedback form, but maybe that feedback form isn't accessible for students who are using a screen reader. Or maybe you're getting students to have this conversation as part of that classroom, as part of that conversation at the end of that unit, but perhaps that's not the safest place for everybody to come forward and let you know about how the unit's been going. They may feel that they might be biased towards their assessments if they actually tell you something is inaccessible. Or you might have students with social anxiety who don't feel comfortable communicating in front of a large group what the barriers are. So how do we find really inclusive and accessible ways to elevate student voice and student perspective and really take that seriously in our learning design? 

I think a really great example, well I think it's a great example, something from um from Griffith University, with the colleague that I'm working with, Stuart Woodcock, we were talking with students last year and really working out what is working in that unit, what needs to be further improved or what could be added to that unit to make it more accessible and inclusive and make it a really effective learning experience for them. And you know, one of the examples that came out was having an evening class, because we had a group of students in that unit who were in the school and working in the school environment from nine till three o'clock and then by the time they drove home, you know, one of our latest classes was from four till six. They would join at five o'clock and miss the first hour and then have to watch the recording and catch up on that first hour. And it was only having that student feedback and having students say, actually, you know, if we had an evening class, that would make this learning experience so much more accessible for me and I wouldn't be juggling work and study. And we took that on board and we've done it. So, yeah, really look to that student perspective because it can really make visible things that aren't visible to you or I as an educator, otherwise.

Joe: Yeah, and I mean I'll build on your example, Elizabeth. I mean I incorporated student feedback into my kind of end of semester assessments and reporting years and years ago. I mean, on one module they write a reflection paper and it's only 10 percent, so it's low stakes, okay. But the brief in the reflection paper says tell me three things that you liked about the module. Okay, so three kind of you know plus things. But then I want three critiques of the module. Okay, and I want you to tell me how I could improve this for the students next year. And I don't just want you to tell me what was wrong with the module from your perspective or you know why it was weak, I want you to give me at least one solution for each of those critiques. And I frame this and I say you will not be marked down for critiquing the module. Okay, quite the opposite. This is helping you develop your skills where in in business, when you go out into business, you will need to critique, you know subordinates work, um, for instance, people in your team that are working with you and for you. You'll need to sometimes say, like you know this needs doing differently or whatever. So you need to learn how to frame this kind of positive feedback. So this is helping you develop skills that you're going to use in the workplace. So that goes back to the why you know for them. One of the things I do on day one with the new class is I take them through the changes I've made as a result of the feedback from last year. So straight away the students are hearing this, this isn't just a static course, it's up to date and it's informed by student voice. If I do suggest something, there's a good chance that it will happen. But it will be you know, something will change, so it gets us off to a really good start. And it also then, when we're talking about feedback loops and we're talking about voice of the customer and we're talking about voice of the student and all that kind of stuff, they've already seen it in action and know that it works. Now it might not be that I'm doing it as accessibly as possible, because I tend to just have it as a written report, although now I do give them the option if they can write this, or they can put it in as a video, so they can record it as a video, or they can write it. So you know there's multiple means of representation going on there, um but, but at least the feedback loop is built in and then that comes back into the design process as well.

Darren:  Yeah, look, the multiple modes of representations just got me, you know instantly thinking of a hundred different things that fit with stuff which we've spoken about before, and that renewing and putting things into you know multimodal format. So you know if there's a limited window there to you know change, you know your course or your content, or even if it's just for one week of material, maybe you can look at it, well, this is what I've got, are there other ways of presenting this which may be more accessible? Is there some other ways that I could chunk this up, because at the minute it's a three page document. Some of it could be now spoken, some of it could be video, some of it could be done with a soundtrack behind it, just to give people some space, etcetera. 

But I also wanted to touch on sometimes less is more. There's a real risk with AI to certainly, you know, add more and more and more in there when we've got some courses, if you look at the number of resources that have been added, in a lot of cases for students it's certainly more than the credit score of actually doing the unit. You know, putting some of those limitations that you know you were talking about Joe in there around, what do I want you to do and what's that playing field that we want you in? Because for some students they can get lost in - there's just so many options here - and they'll just go around in circles. So, you know, having a really clear example is there. Bringing up, as you were saying that, how feedback's been used in the past and how that does inform things can certainly help that process of you know where does this all sit for students. The opportunities again which we're looking at in this, you know what are those inclusive learning opportunities that come with using AI in terms of I'll say it in a very bad way, but are we seeing the death of PowerPoint? You know where it's fixed. This was how we deliver things online, this is how we're taught to do it, or not taught to do it, it just became the staple way of doing things. We moved from overhead projectors to PowerPoints. Now that we've got all of these options and these ways of representing material and delivering. So if you're going in to think about developing that course or just that week, or whatever it might be, is PowerPoint at your front of mind? If you're thinking UDL, Elizabeth, or is it the format it takes come last.

Elizabeth: The format that it takes is taking a bit more of a backseat. I think what is taking more of that forward seat is moving away from thinking that students are blank slates that are just going to absorb that information, a bit like you know that idea of the lecture that we're just providing information. Students are going to write it down or type it up and then suddenly it's going to be absorbed and they'll walk away with all this knowledge inside them. Um, moving more towards that, that more practical, how do we actually apply this knowledge? How do we put this into practice? And so if you are in a situation where you have more of that traditional lecture format is what's happening at your institution or what's really situated in that timeframe, how can you perhaps build in those practical aspects into that what would otherwise be just a lecture? How can you build in reflection breaks or times for that conversation, that co-construction of knowledge? How can we build those opportunities where students are actively engaged and not just passive recipients of information? I know that joe does some great work around this.

Joe: Well, I yeah, I must admit, PowerPoint is not kind of my go-to tool anymore um, I've got decks that I still use because they're pre-prepared and I haven't, you know, gone and completely redesigned every teaching you know bit of teaching material that I'm ever using. Um, but if I'm starting from scratch now, um, my default would be a Notion document, probably because you can embed virtually anything into a Notion document and then publish it as a live web page. So I can create material in a Notion document and assemble material. I can send material to a Notion document. I can be in Facebook or I can be in, you know, a magazine on Flipboard or whatever, and I think, oh, that's a really interesting thing, that would be good in that session. I can just send it to that Notion document and it just appears at the bottom and then I can kind of fold it in, you know, later on and stuff. So I don't start by default now thinking, oh, I'm going to create a PowerPoint deck. I might create a deck if there's a particular series of points that I want to deliver in that way. But most of the time now I'm trying to create learning sessions that are not delivery and PowerPoint tends to to steer you towards delivery, because you get into that, that old paradigm of I'm sitting going through a deck and here's the next slide, yes, and here's the next slide, yes, and here's the next idea, whereas you know I'm finding anyway with with a Notion dock, it's much easier for me to say right now I want everybody to to, to go, you know, down the Notion, doc, go to where I've got this link, okay, now you're going to click on that link and you're going to do a breakout room for 10 minutes or whatever, uh, and below it there's a, there's a little brief for what I want you to do. Okay, so now go off into the breakout rooms, follow that link, do what, do what I've asked you to do? Okay, so now go off into the breakout rooms, follow that link, do what I've asked you to do, and we're going to come back and have another discussion or whatever. So I'm teaching by presenting far less now, and I find that these types of tools are allowing me to do that, you know, in an easier way, because I think you fall into the trap of push delivery with PowerPoint. So just switching out using something other than PowerPoint can be good.

And going back to Elizabeth's point I think it was earlier on as well. You know things like kind of teaching in 45 minute sections. I mean 45 minutes is generally, I think, accepted as most people's kind of threshold of attention span, and a lot of my sessions, university sessions, are either two or three hours. So in a three-hour block I will give my students two 15-minute breaks and it's amazing how few people do that. Most people teach an hour and 20 minutes or whatever, then give them a 10 or 15-minute break and then teach another hour and a half, kind of, and nobody's listening after an hour. Consistently. I get very, very good student feedback on the fact that two breaks during a longer session is far better than one in the middle, and it's good for me as well because I get a little you know, a little mental downtime as well, and I think listening to students and thinking about the student experience like this is so, so important. You're nodding frantically, Elizabeth. This is obviously resonating with you.

Elizabeth: It certainly is. And look the tutorials that I teach, they are two hours long and many of those are also online, and so you know you think that students can very easily drift onto another browser or open a new tab and start something else. So you know, we do use PowerPoint, for us, it's a really great guide through that tutorial to make sure that we're covering particular aspects or speaking about particular aspects, but the student engagement is really the driving force of that. So over two hours we might have, you know, 15 or 20 slides, but that's because there are so many opportunities for deep engagement and that deep practical work. So, yeah, definitely engagement's the key and finding ways to do that, even if it includes PowerPoint, finding ways to get that active participation for students and thinking about how we can do that in a really inclusive way.

Darren: I might just jump in just quickly with the time, speaking of 45 minute sections, because I think we'll talk about this one for several hours and we still won't finish, because we're very excited about this topic certainly. But just before we do, I wanted to quickly ask you first Joe, and then Elizabeth, if there's something you could get somebody to take away from today, what's that one thing that they could start with in terms of using AI under that UDL framework and thinking about accessibility, the one thing that they could go and do now? They may not have necessarily played in this space. Is there something you'd like them to go and investigate or to do that could change how they're putting that content and planning together?

Joe: I think for me I'm going to ask for two things, Darren, rather than one. So you know, one would be try and remember to embed overtly the need to link to UDL, accessibility, inclusivity, into your prompts or into your back-end kind of prompts for your AIs. And the second one is use multiple AIs, you know, because you want multiple voices in the room. So if you're going to use AIs, you know, combine them with your own knowledge and with the knowledge of your colleagues and students and stuff, but don't just use one, try, try different ones, because you get different things back. It's a richer experience.

Elizabeth: Well, for me, it's um, it's even building on our conversation today and, you know, previously I mentioned the, the design was all human brain driven and human interaction driven. But I've learned a lot Joe from hearing about your process and starting out with that and then using AI to elaborate on it and really see what the things might come up or what I or others may have not considered yet, and how we can actually use AI to do that and expand our thinking. So for me, it's going to be thinking about you know what my current process is going through, that current process that works for me, but then seeking how AI might be able to contribute and elaborate on that. So for other educators out there, I think, don't be afraid to hear what others are doing in this space. Don't be afraid to admit that, yeah, I currently don't use AI when I'm planning courses, I use my own brain and really test out and see, well, where could this actually take me if I did apply a bit of that into my own space, and I'll be doing that too. So I'll be learning alongside everybody. How can AI help me to elaborate on that design phase? 

So I think that then takes us to our time, as always, we would love to encourage you to go and explore some of those tools for yourself. You know this particular session, you can be exploring alongside me and seeing how that might actually contribute to your own design and your own learning experiences. So try some of the things that we've discussed in this episode. Obviously keep in mind some of those principles we've mentioned around privacy and ethics. So, as you go, be aware of those, play safely and if you'd like to see any of the tools that we've discussed or any of the text prompts, they are going to be available in the show notes on the ADCET website at www.adcet.edu.au/ilotathings. 

Joe: As Elizabeth said, do go and try some of the tools. We will put some of the links in the show notes and they'll take you to the different tools. Um, but particularly with this episode, you know, because I've kind of gone through my process, I'd I would love to hear whether the process works for you and whether there's other bits of process that I could, you know, change or add in that work for you, because we all do things in a different way and sometimes just hearing other people's processes help. So, you know, comment on the show notes or whatever, drop us an email and we'll pick up any feedback that we get. So, yeah, please share with us, if you can, your thoughts on the episode and on what we've covered, and whether it's good, bad, whether there's ideas that you're coming up with. You can drop us an email at feedback@ilotofthings.com, and we would love to hear from you.

Darren: And unfortunately, as I said, that's our time for this episode, but I hope that we've been able to give you an insight into how AI can help you and your students in delivering those inclusive learning outcomes, and some opportunities for educators to refresh, renew and look at the ways that they're delivering that content with multiple modes of representation, etc. So thank you very much for listening and we hope that you can join us for the next episode as we continue to explore a lot of things. Till then, take care and keep on learning. See you next time. 

Joe: Bye from Dublin 

Elizabeth: Bye.

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