Tonight I watched the Quality Matters (QM) webinar titled “The AI Authoring Advantage: Balancing Speed and Substance in Course Creation.” Dr. Jason Neiffer is the Executive Director of Montana Digital Academy. The Academy is located on the University of Montana campus. Neiffer created a presentationbuddy link: presentationbuddy.io/qmwebinar0325 This is a ChatGPT with the slides and transcript of the session to help answer questions! Neiffer spoke about training students to find the “right” uses for AI. Neiffer asked: what can AI do for instructional design? However, Neiffer is concerned that the focus is on speed. Neiffer has been experimenting with different AI tools and acknowledges their power… and still some improvements are needed! Neiffer has created bots to optimize reading and even summarize as podcasts. Some examples Neiffer shared were the creation of objectives and multiple choice questions. Neiffer spoke about using the “Understanding by Design” framework but that it is sometimes challenging. With Open Educational Resources (OER), excellent college texts are available, and Neiffer explained that NotebookLM can be used. Since OER are openly licensed, Neiffer noted that the information can be used to develop course resources. Once the NotebookLM is created, one can ask questions of it or … chat with the collected textbooks. Neiffer called the notebook a “knowledge oracle” that can be used to summarize and create custom content. The audience asked several questions, and Neiffer provided ideas. They emphasized that use of AI is a valuable strategy. for many course designers!
