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AI Design Assistant: Test Question

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 provides suggestions for individual questions that can be added to a test in a Learn Ultra course. It can create Essay, Fill in the blank, Matching, Multiple choice and True/False questions.

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

Start with a new or existing Test:

The Test editing canvas. In the centre pain are a list of the questions that make up the test. To the right is the Settings pane where you can adjust features such as due date and the total possible mark.
In this example we have renamed the test Knowledge Check and added a paragraph of text at the start, but it hasn’t any questions yet.

Then select the pink plus icon to add a new question:

The add content button appears as a plus surrounded by a circle. It can be accessed by hovering above or below existing content.

This opens a menu of possible question types

This is a long list but includes the usual suspects such as hotspot, calculated question, true/false, multi-choice, etc.
The full list of possible questions types is shown in the Add Question menu

Select the first option: Auto-generate question

This opens the question design page. Like the other AI-tools, it will try and generate some questions for you as soon as it is launched, using the course title and some default values to create them:

Now the page has a set of options down the left hand side and a list of generated questions to the right. The generated questions are a mix - two fill in the blank and one true/false are visible.
Several different types of suggested questions are shown, because the default Question Type is Inspire me!

Getting good results

In this example the question types is set to multi-choice and the description field has been populated.

For best results you should 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 suggestions of topics to cover or learning outcomes in this box using plain text. These are used to help refine the AI prompt. The example above uses the prompt: Identify the three philosophical trends that are associated with the historical development of alchemy.

Question Type

Use this control to determine what type of questions should be generated. The options you can choose from are:

  • Inspire me! – the default (a random mix)
  • Essay (really short essay)
  • Fill in the blank
  • Matching
  • Multiple choice
  • True/False

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 question whose language is so complex that your students can’t understand it!

Number of questions

Use the slider to indicate how many questions you want the tool to generate for you. Note that you don’t need to accept all the suggested questions to add to your course, you are free to pick and choose.

Generate

Use the Generate button to apply your changes

Selecting the questions to use

When you are happy with the output, use the checkboxes to the left of each suggested question to add it to the test.

Possible questions are displayed in a list. The first column is a checkbox used to select the question. In this example only 1 is ticked.
In this example, just the first questions has been selected so far

Use the black Add to Assessment button to add the selected questions

The selected questions now appear on the test canvas, below the existing explanatory text.
The learning questions now appear in your test

They now behave like any other question. You can drag them up and down to re-order them, changes the points awarded and use the standard Edit option at the right to change the text, the correct answer and any distractors.

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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