How Easy Is It/Will It Be to Use AI to Design a Course? — from wallyboston.com by Wally Boston

Excerpt:

Last week I received a text message from a friend to check out a March 29th Campus Technology article about French AI startup, Nolej. Nolej (pronounced “Knowledge”) has developed an OpenAI-based instructional content generator for educators called NolejAI.

Access to NolejAI is through a browser. Users can upload video, audio, text documents, or a website url. NolejAI will generate an interactive micro-learning package which is a standalone digital lesson including content transcript, summaries, a glossary of terms, flashcards, and quizzes. All the lesson materials generated is based upon the uploaded materials.


From DSC:
I wonder if this will turn out to be the case:

I am sure it’s only a matter of time before NolejAI or another product becomes capable of generating a standard three credit hour college course. Whether that is six months or two years, it’s likely sooner than we think.


Also relevant/see:

The Ultimate 100 AI Tools

The Ultimate 100 AI Tools -- as of 4-12-23


 

From DSC:
Before we get to Scott Belsky’s article, here’s an interesting/related item from Tobi Lutke:


Our World Shaken, Not Stirred: Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more. — from implications.com by Scott Belsky
Things will get weird. And exciting.

Excerpts:

Recent advances in technology will stir shake the pot of culture and our day-to-day experiences. Examples? A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge, online social dynamics will become “hybrid experiences” where AI personas are equal players, and we will sync ourselves with applications as opposed to using applications.

A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge as the world’s video archives – as well as actors’ bodies and voices – will be used to train models. Expect sequels made without actor participation, a new era of ai-outfitted creative economy participants, a deluge of imaginative media that would have been cost prohibitive, and copyright wars and legislation.

Unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, some amazing stuff, and a legal dumpster fire: Now lets shift beyond Hollywood to the fast-growing long tail of prosumer-made entertainment. This is where entirely new genres of entertainment will emerge including the unauthorized sequels and spinoffs that I expect we will start seeing.


Also relevant/see:

Digital storytelling with generative AI: notes on the appearance of #AICinema — from bryanalexander.org by Bryan Alexander

Excerpt:

This is how I viewed a fascinating article about the so-called #AICinema movement.  Benj Edwards describes this nascent current and interviews one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland.  It’s a great example of people creating small stories using tech – in this case, generative AI, specifically the image creator Midjourney.

Bryan links to:

Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe — from arstechnica.com by Benj Edwards
A Q&A with “synthographer” Julie Wieland on the #aicinema movement.

An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called Vinyl Vengeance by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney.


From DSC:
How will text-to-video impact the Learning and Development world? Teaching and learning? Those people communicating within communities of practice? Those creating presentations and/or offering webinars?

Hmmm…should be interesting!


 

The Future of Teaching is Here — from samchaltain.substack.com by Sam Chaltain

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

It’s not sexy, but I feel like Sal Khan’s recent video introducing his Academy’s GPT-fueled AI tutor augurs the future of the teaching profession — and not just at Khan Academy.

The tutor is already fully capable of offering personalized feedback, hints and suggestions for just about any topic for which there are already clearly established answers — from solving math equations with parentheses to digesting John Locke’s political philosophy.

But now we’ve entered a new chapter — dare I say, a Technological Singularity (20 years early) — one in which Chat-GPT in particular, and the daily flood of AI tools more generally, has changed the nature of the teacher/student relationship even more irrevocably than before.

As a result, from this day forward, the job of a teacher REALLY needs to stop being about transmission.

So what should it start being instead?

In which case, the future of teaching is not about transmission, but it is about the other trans- words: transmedia exploration, transdisciplinary weaving, transcultural understanding, and, yes, personal and societal transformation.

 
 

Why some college professors are adopting ChatGPT AI as quickly as students — from cnbc.com by Carolyn Chun

Key Points:

  • A recent analysis by researchers at NYU, Princeton and the Wharton School finds that many of the jobs that will be most “exposed” to generative AI such as ChatGPT are in the college teaching profession.
  • One of the first narratives to emerge from the sudden explosion in usage of ChatGPT is the risk of students cheating on writing assignments.
  • But use by college teachers is growing quickly too, and adoption by educators may be critical to making the case that AI will augment the jobs humans are doing rather than replace them.

Also relevant/see:


 


Also relevant/see:

 


Also relevant/see:


Learning Designers will have to adapt or die. 10 ways to UPSKILL to AI…. — from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com by Donald Clark

Learning Designers need to upskill


From Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn:

Take a look at this simulated negotiation, with grading and feedback. Prompt: “I want to do deliberate practice about how to conduct negotiations. You will be my negotiation teacher. You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a negotiation. You will fill the role of one party, I will fill the role of the other. You will ask for my response to in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it. After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says. You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation. You will give me a harder scenario if I do well, and an easier one if I fail.”

Samples from Bing Creative mode and ChatGPT-4 (3.5, the free version, does not work as well)


I’m having a blast with ChatGPT – it’s testing ME! — from by Mark Mrohs
Using ChatGPT as an agent for asynchronous active learning

I have been experimenting with possible ways to incorporate interactions with ChatGPT into instruction. And I’m blown away. I want to show you some of what I’ve come up with.

 

Canva’s New AI Wonder Tools — from wondertools.substack.com  by Jeremy Caplan
A magic eraser, a branding kit, AI presentations, and more new features

Excerpt:

Canva launched a bunch of new features at a live event viewed by 1.5 million people globally. The Australian company is no longer an upstart. 125 million people use it monthly, including 13 million paid subscribers yielding $1.4 billion in revenue. Canva’s increasingly competing with Adobe to help people create eye-catching visuals. Here are its most useful new tricks.

 

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
People often ask me how to use AI. Here’s an overview with lots of links.

Excerpts:

We live in an era of practical AI, but many people haven’t yet experienced it, or, if they have, they might have wondered what the big deal is. Thus, this guide. It is a modified version of one I put out for my students earlier in the year, but a lot has changed. It is an overview of ways to get AI to do practical things.

I want to try to show you some of why AI is powerful, in ways both exciting and anxiety-producing.

The Six Large Language Models


Also see Ethan’s posting:

Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks


 

Teaching: What You Can Learn From Students About ChatGPT — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Like a lot of you, I have been wondering how students are reacting to the rapid launch of generative AI tools. And I wanted to point you to creative ways in which professors and teaching experts have helped involve them in research and policymaking.

At Kalamazoo College, Autumn Hostetter, a psychology professor, and six of her students surveyed faculty members and students to determine whether they could detect an AI-written essay, and what they thought of the ethics of using various AI tools in writing. You can read their research paper here.

Next, participants were asked about a range of scenarios, such as using Grammarly, using AI to make an outline for a paper, using AI to write a section of a paper, looking up a concept on Google and copying it directly into a paper, and using AI to write an entire paper. As expected, commonly used tools like Grammarly were considered the most ethical, while writing a paper entirely with AI was considered the least. But researchers found variation in how people approached the in-between scenarios. Perhaps most interesting: Students and faculty members shared very similar views with each scenario.

 


Also relevant/see:

This Was Written By a Human: A Real Educator’s Thoughts on Teaching in the Age of ChatGPT — from er.educause.edu educause.org by Jered Borup
The well-founded concerns surrounding ChatGPT shouldn’t distract us from considering how it might be useful.


 

The above Tweet links to:

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — from futureoflife.org
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.



However, the letter has since received heavy backlash, as there seems to be no verification in signing it. Yann LeCun from Meta denied signing the letter and completely disagreed with the premise. (source)


In Sudden Alarm, Tech Doyens Call for a Pause on ChatGPT — from wired.com by Will Knight (behind paywall)
Tech luminaries, renowned scientists, and Elon Musk warn of an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy ever-more-powerful AI systems.


 

ChatGPT: Student insights are necessary to help universities plan for the future — from theconversation.com by Alpha Abebe and Fenella Amarasinghe

Excerpt:

In the race to get ahead of new technologies, are we forgetting about the perspectives of the most important stakeholders within our post-secondary institutions: the students?

Leaving students out of early discussions and decision-making processes is almost always a recipe for ill-fitting, ineffective and/or damaging approaches. The mantra “nothing for us without us” comes to mind here.

 

Evolving Zoom IQ, our smart companion, with new features and a collaboration with OpenAI — from blog.zoom.us

Excerpt:

Today we’re announcing that we’re evolving the capabilities of Zoom IQ to become a smart companion that empowers collaboration and unlocks people’s potential by summarizing chat threads, organizing ideas, drafting content for chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, creating meeting agendas, and more.

 


Also from Julie Sobowale, see:

  • Law’s AI revolution is here — from nationalmagazine.ca
    At least this much we know. Firms need to develop a strategy around language models.

Also re: legaltech, see:

  • Pioneers and Pathfinders: Richard Susskind — from seyfarth.com by J. Stephen Poor
    In our conversation, Richard discusses the ways we should all be thinking about legal innovation, the challenges of training lawyers for the future, and the qualifications of those likely to develop breakthrough technologies in law, as well as his own journey and how he became interested in AI as an undergraduate student.

Also re: legaltech, see:

There is an elephant in the room that is rarely discussed. Who owns the IP of AI-generated content?

 

Higher Learning Commission's 2023 Trends

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian