What are some simple strategies for rethinking how you engage and assess students with AI in mind? What is important to consider when it comes to curricular and instructional design with emerging AI technologies? This three-hour masterclass at OLC Accelerate 2023 will engage participants in reimagining our pedagogical practices with AI in mind. Our focus will be on language learning models like Chat GPT and Bard, as well as other AI-embedded edtech solutions. AI video or image generation will not be a focus for this workshop.

During this workshop, we will delve into the following:

• AI Meets Assessment: How might we reshape assessment strategies with AI as a partner in teaching and learning?
• AI Meets Student-Centered Teaching: How can we leverage AI to foster a more student-centered learning environment?
• AI Meets Curricular and Instructional Design: How can AI enhance our instructional design approaches to create engaging and effective learning experiences?
• AI Meets Writing & Research: How can AI support and enhance research, writing, and inquiry in our classrooms?
• AI Meets Reflective, Metacognitive Practice: How might we revisit metacognitive practices while incorporating student reflection around AI and tech use?
• AI Meets Equitable Learning: How can we utilize AI to support equitable teaching practices and foster inclusivity in the classroom?
• AI Meets Ethics: How do we engage students and educators as key stakeholders in the ethical considerations surrounding AI in education and society?

This workshop not only invites participants to revisit their current teaching methods and course designs, but also to examine and practice using AI to create teaching and learning materials and resources – that you can use today! In the spirit of what Reed calls “Transparent AI Practices” (TAP), this abstract and title were generated using ChatGPT 4.0 through a series of queries and minor edits.

The OLC’s Scorecard Suite provides criteria and guidelines that support the design, development, delivery, management, and evaluation of online and blended courses and programs. The suite’s flexible, customizable framework provides individual scorecards that address key dimensions of high-quality online teaching and learning. They can be used individually to address specific needs, but they are most powerful when applied holistically as a coordinated, integrated approach to creating, launching, evolving, and benchmarking your courses and programs. In this master class, you will learn how to leverage the OLC’s Scorecard Suite to support a life cycle of quality assurance, ensuring that your offerings are engaging, effective, inclusive, and accessible for a diverse audience of learners. This master class will equip you to analyze your existing courses and programs, identify targeted areas for improvement, and create a roadmap to guide the development of new initiatives using OLC’s best-in-class resources, including:

• OSCQR: The course-level quality rubric for reviewing and improving the instructional design and accessibility of online courses based on online best practices.
• Administration of Online Programs: Benchmarks and standards to evaluate the quality of online programs, and initiate planning efforts towards areas of improvement.
• Student Success: This scorecard assists in the identification of gaps in services and provides a pathway to improve support services for online students.
• QCTIP: Designed to evaluate the overall classroom experience, this tool can be used to evaluate teaching effectiveness in several areas, including: Course Fundamentals, Learning Foundations, Faculty Engagement and Student Engagement.

Participating in this master class will also enable you to:

• Articulate the benefits of the OLC scorecards suite for your organization.
• Advance strategies to celebrate successes and improve programs in a holistic, longitudinal way.
• Promote learner equity, accessibility and success through quality initiatives.
• Develop a plan to implement sustainable quality initiatives across your organization.
• Take advantage of opportunities to engage with the OLC community as peer reviewers, volunteers, storytellers, researchers, and writers.

ChatGPT is capable of generating robust educational content, making it an exceptionally effective tool for educators and curriculum designers for creating engaging course materials for students. ChatGPT, which has garnered significant attention this past year, has the potential to revolutionize online education by facilitating the creation of personalized learning experiences for students. It simplifies the generation of various course content types, including learning objectives, lesson plans, syllabi, lecture notes, quizzes, classroom activities, and student feedback. Once reviewed, revised (often many times over), iterated, tinkered with, and improved, the produced content is generally of high quality. This advanced masterclass will explore a deep dive into ChatGPT, scrutinizing its benefits and drawbacks for educators and identifying its current limitations. Participants will engage in a multitude of hands-on activities, working collaboratively in groups to develop course content for “courses” that we will create together using ChatGPT. Our aim is to produce content such as syllabi, lesson plans, lecture notes, course policies, rubrics, assignments, quizzes, classroom activities, a lecture slide deck (PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc.) and potentially student feedback.

AI is especially advantageous for crafting materials like lecture notes and quizzes that necessitate precise and coherent text. It can also produce engaging and interactive classroom activities that promote student involvement and make learning enjoyable. In some instances, ChatGPT allows educators to tailor course materials to suit the distinct needs and expectations of individual students. Even though the concept of learning styles and the meshing hypothesis are fallacious, ChatGPT can still create activity outlines centered on specific sensory principles. By evaluating a student’s prior interactions and performance (note: never use a real student’s name or any identifying information), ChatGPT can generate customized materials that cater to their learning needs and preferences, enhancing student engagement and learning outcomes by providing more relevant and valuable content.

Additionally, ChatGPT can be integrated to optimize content creation for educators and instructional designers, such as producing large volumes of quiz or test questions. Since the model can create multiple options for each question, it can also be utilized to develop question banks for formative assessments. Another key application of ChatGPT in education is producing personalized and meaningful feedback on student work, which can improve student engagement and learning outcomes. For example, it can help facilitate feedback for written responses, offer constructive feedback, and identify areas requiring further support. Educators can even provide assignment rubrics for precise assessment feedback.

It is essential to emphasize that ChatGPT is not meant to replace human educators but to enhance their efforts. AI-generated content must be examined and refined by a human educator to ensure accuracy, relevance, pedagogical integrity, and the preservation of the vital human touch in education. In the end, educators and course designers are responsible for ensuring their educational offerings deliver the best outcomes and mastery for their students.

ChatGPT has the potential to transform the way course content is created in education. It excels at generating high-quality, articulate, and human-like text rapidly and effortlessly, making it an optimal tool for diverse course materials such as learning objectives, lesson plans, syllabi, lecture notes, quizzes, classroom activities, and student feedback. Moreover, it can customize materials to meet individual students’ needs and learning styles, rendering the content more relevant and useful. However, it is critical to acknowledge that ChatGPT is not a substitute for human educators and should be used in a manner that supports and complements their efforts. This advanced Masterclass will delve into ChatGPT’s capabilities and limitations in the context of course content creation and discuss potential implementation strategies.

Upon completion of this session, faculty, developers, and directors will be able to apply a series of evidence-based practices and resources for individual and collective growth that balances excellence with fulfillment. Given all that has been experienced the last few years, and the significant changes to teaching, learning, and broader functions of the campus, it is critical to collaborate going forward using approaches that incorporate care and well-being. Our 2022 research findings indicate that 50% of faculty (N = 530) are experiencing burnout, with 55% of them reporting they do not have the time to teach effectively (Alchemy, 2022). In many cases, this has become exacerbated by 2/3 of faculty now teaching across multiple modalities. Many report that they do not have capacity to take on more or to be further “developed” to adapt to realities we did not foresee happening so rapidly. To provide further meaning and emphasis on humanizing our findings, we used additional qualitative personae research analysis and identified six faculty persona types. These personae are not meant to pigeonhole or stereotype faculty as fitting within simple and discreet profiles. However, it provides consideration for the varying interests, specializations, aspirations, needs, dis/likes and how these inform a more humanized lens that serves an equitable and effective approach to faculty success. For each of the personae, we provide examples and resources for the best ways in which they may be supported.

As directors, developers, and colleagues, we want to support faculty to grow and succeed in new and evolving higher education contexts. However, we must do so in ways that embrace and continue to feed the passions that brought them to the faculty role. It is imperative to meet them where they are and enable them to progress in ways they can connect to and appreciate. To enable this, we move to the next segment of the workshop, which is helping faculty develop their own agreements for self-care. This is based on The Four Agreements (Ruiz, 1997) and resulting activities that lead faculty through reflection on the original passion and goals that brought them to higher education. In doing so, they also identify any “joy stealers” and ways to limit or confront those. This is a very interactive segment of the workshop, with each participant creating a path forward for greater “instructional wellness.” This leads to the final segment of the workshop, using the Purposeful Learning Check to reflect on elements of their course, respond to non-evaluative prompts, and receive real-time feedback and resources designed to help them take manageable next steps in iterating their course. This experience enables them to move forward at their own pace in a very formative manner, whether they choose to work alone or consult a colleague or learning designer.

Key takeaways from this Continuum of Care workshop include: applying evidence from Burnt Out & Overburdened: The Faculty Experience 2022 report to minimize burnout (Alchemy, 2022); access to the Faculty Personae Report with recommended techniques and resources to best serve respective faculty persona (Alchemy, 2023); creation of an individualized set of Agreements for Self-Care and related resources to apply with others as a developer; access to examples and resources that support instructional wellness, and on-going access to the Purposeful Learning Check to enable course care toward learning experiences that are most humanized, inclusive, and engaging.