Christopher Longo and Barbara Frey from the University of Pittsburgh spoke at the Quality matters Quality in Action conference on “Leveraging Automation for Teaching Efficiency.” Longo is an instructional design specialist with a decade of experience. Frey is very active with Quality Matters and teaches courses on instructional design. The goal of this session was to identify tools and strategies that can save time and enhance consistency/efficiency of courses. Frey spoke about how automation can save time and reduce the workload. Some strategies may increase social and instructor presence and promote consistency and accessibility. Examples provided included scheduling/automating announcements and using automatic accessibility checkers. Frey shared how they use scheduled announcements. We use Google Docs with weekly announcements we edit each semester and personalize. Next, Frey shared how email rules and filters can help automate emails for courses using subject lines with course numbers. Frey uses Zoom to track attendance using the Reports features. Learning Management Systems (LMS) also have activity reports that can be helpful. Magic School can help find tools and resources. Presentation Generator was a tool Frey shared to create a presentations. Longo spoke about scheduling modules by date to manage course progression. Modules can be set to be unavailable until requirements are met. Longo noted that videos, URLs, and keys can be set to be available when needed. Hiding the content after an assessment or activity was an idea I had not considered. Autograded assessments can include multiple-choice questions and fill-in-the-blank paragraphs and scenario-based questions. Answer feedback can be provided automatically. Longo explained that feedback can direct students to specific videos or pages to review. For peer review, Longo noted that tools in the LMS can help assign, randomize, distribute, and set review deadlines. NotebookLM was the next tool Longo described. Each notebook can use up to fifty resources, and the audio overview is useful. A participant mentioned NotebookLM seems to be a “walled garden” and can allow you to summarize reports. The session ended with a fun discussion about how convincing the audio overviews produced by NotebookLM can be!
