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AI Design Assistant: Discussion Boards

This is one of the new AI Design Assistant tools in Learn Ultra that have been made available to staff from January 2024. Their use was recommended by the Educational Development Committee in November and approved by Education Committee in December 2023.

Purpose

Use of this tool is entirely optional. It suggests topics for discussion in a Learn Ultra course.

It is only visible to staff with any one of the following roles in the course:

  • Instructor
  • Module Administrator
  • Course Builder
  • Teaching Assistant
Quick links

Video demonstration

Step-by-Step guide

Finding the tool

Create a new (or empty) Discussion Board and open it. At the top of the screen you will see a large black button: Auto-generate discussion.

Press the Auto-generate discussion button to begin the process:

The Auto-generate discussion button appears after the discussion title field on the page.

After a short delay, potential discussion topics are displayed:

Three potential topics are listed. Below each the Cognitive level is indicated.

Getting good results

The tool always tries to generate content immediately after being launched (based on the course title), but for best results you will want to configure it using the settings panel on the left hand side and ask it to generate again. Each field in the settings panel is explained below:

Description

Enter some text to help define the area you want students to explore. It should be in plain text and you can enter up to 2,000 characters. This is used to help refine the AI prompt.

Desired cognitive level

You can select the focus of the discussion, using Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy as a reference.

A pyramid. At the top is create, below that in order: evaluate, analyze, apply, understand, and finally at the base, remember.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, image created by staff at Vanderbilt University, shared via Flickr opens a new window under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

The options you can choose from are:

  • Inspire me! – the default (a mix of levels)
  • Apply
  • Analyse
  • Evaluate
  • Create

Complexity

This slider field is used to help shape the reading level of the generated text. The further to the right of the scale, the more complex and technical will be the language. The extreme left is meant to be early primary school, the extreme right, PhD thesis level. Experiment with this to see how it applies to your discipline. Remember that there is no point writing a topic whose language is so complex that your students can’t understand it!

Generate discussion title

If you tick this checkbox, then the tool will suggest a title for the discussion topic too. This will replace any existing title you may have set.

Generate

Use the Generate button to apply your changes

Selecting the content to use

When you are happy with the output, use the radio buttons to the left of each suggested topic to indicate which one you want to use.

The Discussion panel has four fields: the Description is a text input, the Desired cognitive level is a select, Complexity is a slider (from low to high) and the Generate discussion title is a checkbox.
In this example the second suggestion has been selected

Use the black Add button to update your discussion.

The selected discussion and title are now displayed in the course, just like any other discussion board topic you have created before.
The topic now appears in your course

You can use the standard editing tools to alter the title, make changes to the topic, or even add an image. When you are happy with the content, you can make it visible to your students.

Acknowledging AI use

When the tools were approved at Education Committee a student rep suggested that staff should acknowledge their use in the course, just as we ask students to acknowledge the use of generative AI in their assignments. This was seen as good practice and the recommendation approved.

Our AI Design Assistant: Acknowledging Use page provides some suggestions.

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