Author: Celena Kusch

When we talk about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it can be easy to focus on sensational stories about deepfakes, AI relationships, or humans offloading so much of their work that AIs are just summarizing and evaluating other AI’s reports. The greatest impact of AI isn’t in the splashy story, though. It’s in the small, AI-enabled changes that can free up hours of time that we can redirect to building human relationships.

Microsoft Copilot doesn’t get as much press as ChatGPT, but as a workplace productivity tool, it can make a meaningful dent in your workload. Copilot is built directly into Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Word, making it easy to use in everyday tasks.

Many faculty and staff are using Copilot to draft weekly course announcements based on your course schedule, identify action steps from documents or emails, build email templates to automate interactions, and turn bullet points into polished messages they can quickly edit and personalize.

Try Today

Click the Copilot button in any Word document, PowerPoint, Excel file, or Outlook email to access embedded Copilot chat. Then, use preprogrammed prompts or ask your own.

The suggestions do not need to change your voice to streamline your workload. “What are some ways I could improve this document?” can point out suggestions for reordering, eliminating redundancy, and even just formatting for greater clarity.

In the calendar document pictured above, I asked Copilot to create an invitation to faculty participants at my university for each item on the calendar. It compiled all the logistical details, which I can cut and paste directly into emails I can pre-schedule in Outlook. I didn’t have to worry about Copilot hallucinating events because this chat is already focused on my Word document. Try out a similar prompt with the Schedule of Assignments in your syllabus.

Because it’s embedded in Microsoft tools, Copilot can be more aware of the context of your task and can save you time clicking between windows and applications.

Key Benefit: Accessibility

Working natively within Microsoft applications, Copilot generates more accessible content than materials created in another AI then exported or saved to Microsoft formats.

ChatGPT-generated presentations or Canva templates, for instance, can lose all master slide formatting and even generate language errors or other issues with file properties when exported to PowerPoint. Bringing the exported PowerPoint up to accessibility standards can lose a lot of the time you gained by generating your content.

In contrast, Copilot generates PowerPoints and Word documents with appropriate headings, styles, and themes, so your Accessibility Check does not add time to your workflow.

The Takeaway

If you’re curious about ChatGPT.Edu but haven’t quite figured out how it fits into your teaching, you’re not alone. AI suggestions for course materials can fall flat when using a generic AI, but you may be surprised by what you find when you use a customized GPT designed by instructors for instructors.

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Course Review Assistant GPT is a first-of-its-kind chatbot trained on education research in instructional design and online and hybrid learning and tuned to OLC’s evidence-based scorecards to improve course quality.

A Strong First Use Case: Refining What You Already Have

Instead of tackling a full course review, start with something familiar: assignment instructions.

Try using the OLC Course Review Assistant in ChatGPT.Edu to:

• Clarify assignment instructions in student-friendly language
• Ensure that assignments are designed to measure your course learning outcomes
• Break down assignments into step-by-step checklists or guides
• Create rubrics for grading assignments based on your instructions and outcomes

Example prompt:

“My course learning outcomes are [PASTE FROM SYLLABUS]. First evaluate how well my assessments align to the course learning objectives. Then, offer any suggestions for improving the assignment instructions below. Flag any areas in the instructions that might confuse students.” [Copy and Paste or Upload Your Current Assignment]

Review the suggestions for clarifying your instructions. If they help, keep them. If they don’t, you’ve learned something without risk.

Based on its training in instructional design, the OLC Course Review Assistant will ask you follow up questions that may give you new ideas for supporting your students’ learning with assignment examples, guides, rubrics, and other clarifying features.

Getting Started with the OLC Course Review Assistant GPT

USC Upstate is an OLC member. To get started claim your account by going to the OLC homepage, then click on “Create an Account.” Please use your institutional email address as your username as this will link you to our institutional membership.

Once your account is active, you may explore the OLC site, or go directly to the OLC Course Review GPT through your USC Upstate ChatGPT.Edu account. Go to ChatGPT (also available in the SpartanHub), then login by entering your USC Upstate email address in the email box to use single sign on.

In the upper-left of your screen, you’ll see the OLC Course Review Assistant GPT button. Click it and begin interacting with the bot.

Final Thought

You don’t need to redesign your whole course to begin using AI thoughtfully to improve student learning outcomes. One low-stakes, repeatable use of a context-specific GPT can be enough to help you move from curiosity to confidence.

How Blackboard’s AVA Supports Learning Without Replacing You

We’ve all done it. We know the answer is in the user guide or instruction manual, but we don’t want to skim the whole document. Students feel the same way about the course syllabus. They know the answer is in the syllabus, but they don’t know where it is or what to look for.

Blackboard’s AI Virtual Assistant (AVA) is designed to provide just-in-time automated answers about your course and syllabus information, so you don’t have to. You write your syllabus and course instructions into your Blackboard course, and AVA looks up the answers to students’ logistical questions based on your materials.

What Is AVA?

Blackboard’s AVA is a built-in AI agent designed to work only within the closed system of your Blackboard course. It answers objective questions posed in natural language by referring students to specific content you have added to your course. It does not share the information outside your course to train AI models, and it does not search beyond your content to make up answers that sound right.

AVA acts like a self-writing FAQ that students can access anytime, any place.

How Do Students Use AVA?

If you opt to enable AVA in your course, students access AVA when they send you a message through Blackboard. After they click Send on a new message or Reply to an existing message thread, AVA introduces herself.

When students ask about due dates, course policies, assignment instructions, and other objective questions, AVA provides answers and direct links to the source of your course information. The complete record of this interaction is saved for your review within the Message thread in your Blackboard course.

For example, a student could ask if any assignments are due tomorrow. Or they could ask for a list of assignment due dates. AVA searches your assignment due dates and compiles a list of course links.

AVA will intuit some answers, but only if the link to course materials is very clear. For instance, I asked whether Respondus monitoring was required for tests, and AVA concluded it was based on the number of references to Respondus within the course.

AVA did not, however, offer answers that were not directly available within the course materials provided by the instructor. My test course did not include a syllabus with a grading breakdown, so when I asked how much an assignment counted toward the Overall Grade, AVA directed me to wait for the instructor’s response.

As you can see from the sample interactions, AVA is not “chatty” or personal. She does not make judgment calls nor offer a personality that may clash with your instructor presence in your course. She’s simply a clear, formal, automated messenger who directs students to the answers you have already posted in your course. Even at 2 a.m.

Getting Started with AVA in Your Course

AVA is disabled in your class by default. Instructors have the option to enable AVA directly from the Details and Actions area of the Course Content page.

Under the Virtual Assistant heading on the main Course Content page, instructors may click “Edit Settings” to enable or disable AVA messaging.

The Edit Settings button will take you to the Course Settings options, where you may toggle the switch labeled “Allow AVA to reply to messages from students.”

Instructors who wish to use AVA must opt in to using this feature in each course by editing those settings.

Final Thoughts

AVA is a new student-facing AI feature in Blackboard. Its prompting is cautious and careful.

It effectively answers very straightforward questions about course logistics 24/7, and it provides a record of interactions for you to expand upon later.

In her most recent newsletter, “From Crutch to Coach?” Dr. Philippa Hardman, a scholar at the University of Cambridge, asks, does generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) “actually make us more capable, or just faster at outsourcing our thinking?“

As we race to keep pace with AI-driven change, it can be hard to keep up with the latest developments in Learning Science, critical thinking, and AI. Hardman’s Learning Science Newsletter offers an incredibly thorough, up-to-date digest of research, tools, and strategies for using GenAI to improve learning.

If you are looking for one go-to source to stay informed on using AI to implement lessons from learning science, Hardman’s newsletter will serve you well.

Hardman’s free weekly newsletter offers an in-depth look at the links between learning science and instructional design. While some weeks’ posts are more useful for professional instructional designers, others offer a refreshing, research-informed take on productive and innovative uses of GenAI to foster critical thinking and promote metacognition.

Below are some highlights from the past few months:

• “From Crutch to Coach?” offers in-depth analysis of a large-scale research study into the use of GenAI for skill development in professional writing.
• “ChatGPT: The World’s Most Influential Teacher” includes a list of The Ten Principles of Substantive Learning and associated chat prompts learners can use while learning with GenAI.
• “Your Learners Are Using AI to Redesign Your Courses” shares recent survey data about the ways learners reach out to AI to fill gaps in scaffolding of course assignment, integrate emotional support into the learning process, expand opportunities to practice course concepts, and restate course content in ways that are more accessible to them.
• “How to Build an AI Tutor from a Document in 10 Minutes” provides a detailed guide to building your own AI tutor, including a prompt template and suggestions for supplementary materials to upload to improve your tutor’s performance.