I watched the last AI Lightning Talk from the QM Connect 2024 conference. Rudy Lopez with the Alamo Colleges District was the presenter of the session “AI to the Rescue: Elevating Quality Assurance in Online Course Design.” As part of the certification of online courses, instructors complete course design training that includes course mapping. The team of instructional designers supporting hundreds of online course instructors set out to introduce AI to support course design. Lopez noted that use of the tool was powerful because faculty could use the tool to create consistent courses aligned with the QM Specific Review Standards. Lopez said that they use the AI assistant to check for alignment and provide suggestions for clarity and structure. Currently Lopez is piloting the tool internally with the instructional design team. This year, they plan on expanding to instructors that are part of the Alamo Colleges District.
The closing session was about the review of QM standards and supporting reviewer teams. The goals of the pilot were to identify the tone of reviewer feedback and identify common themes. For this, Nikki Lyons and Leota O’Malley from the University of Florida used a closed system developed by the university. The team used Llama 3.1-70b and ChatGPT 4.0. They concluded that ChatGPT provided better summaries with reviewer feedback. O’Malley said that ChatGPT provided better tone analysis. One area of improvement noted is that the feedback provided by AI is not as balanced: “Glows and Grows” are needed, said O’Malley. Next, they want to try CoPilot and work on prompts and systems to provide more collegial feedback. These short five minute sessions shared creative uses of AI for course design and support of QM standards.
