AI-Powered Learning Design

Notes & lessons from the latest run of my AI Learning Design Bootcamp

Hey folks!

This week is the final week of the latest run of my AI Learning Design Bootcamp. During the bootcamp, I ask students share their “aha” moment each week: a moment where they learned something that will stick with them.

Ahead of our final live class tomorrow, I asked AI to create a summary of all of the aha moments from across the bootcamp to share back with my students.

On reading AI’s summary, it struck me that it provides some great insights into the risks and benefits of working with AI from the perspective of a learning designer - so I decided to share it.

Enjoy and happy innovating!
Phil 👋

Project 1: AI-Powered Analysis

This week, you will work with AI to run a needs analysis and generate learner personas for your chosen course.

Aha Moments

• Realising the power of using learning science research to “teach AI” to be a more powerful co-pilot in the design process.

• The realisation that structured and evidence-based prompting significantly improves the quality of AI’s output, leading to more meaningful and accurate results in the analysis stage of the process.

• Observing how adding constraints like budget can effectively narrow down AI-generated options, leading to more practical suggestions.

• Discovering the impact of specific changes in prompting on the outputs generated by AI, demonstrating the AI's sensitivity to input nuances.

• Noticing the potential for AI to reinforce biases and stereotypes through its responses and the importance of human oversight in refining and contextualising AI-generated content.

Project 2: AI-Powered Design

This week, you will work with AI to generate a course outline based on your needs analysis work.

Aha Moments

• Realising the power of structured, evidence-based prompts to rapidly produce evidence-based course outlines.

• Discovering that working with AI requires investment in time and energy up front: writing and refining structured and evidence-based prompts is tough.

• Learning that, once we have refined prompts, we can use AI to turn them into templates and build libraries, highlighting the long term efficiency benefits of AI.

• Exploring how to balance the different capabilities of AI (AI as Apprentice Vs AI as Creative Thought Partner) by experimenting with instructions and inputs.

• Engaging with various AI-powered research tools (e.g., Perplexity, Elicit, Consensus) opened up new possibilities for course design.

• Exploring “research tool Vs ChatGPT prompting” helped learners to get to grips with how AI works (and how to work with it).

Project 3: AI-Powered Development

In your final project, you will work with AI to generate a course storyboard and - if you wish - a prototype, based on your course outline.

Aha Moments

• Realising the power of evidence-based, structured prompts to make informed decisions on modes of delivery.

• Discovering the joy of working with AI to rapidly produce instructional scripts to “feed” to gen-AI text-to-video, text-to-audio, text-to-image and other tools. 

• Noticing the potential for AI to reinforce bad habits - e.g. learning styles - through its responses, and the importance of human oversight in prompting and refining AI-generated content.

• Realising that AI is generally terrible at maths: however much we try, we can’t make it adhere to time constants and word counts.

• Feeling first hand the delight of being able to prototype one or multiple versions of a course, powered by AI. 

Want to design a course with me, powered by AI? Apply for a place on my AI Learning Design Bootcamp (cohorts run monthly).