AI Design Assistant tools:
UON recognises that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly embedded within commonly used applications such as Microsoft Office and web browsers. There are also a wide range of free and paid-for external AI tools available. In response to this, UON commits to supporting staff and students to become AI literate. Where appropriate, teaching and assessment may reference or use AI tools. You can find out more about the University's official position on AI using the link below.
The AI Design Assistant is a feature of Ultra courses, and may be used by academic staff to generate ideas and activities in the following areas:
The AI Design Assistant only generates suggestions when it is asked to by members of academic staff, and cannot automatically add anything to NILE courses. Academic staff are always in control of the AI Design Assistant, and can quickly and easily reject any AI generated ideas before they are added to a NILE course. Anything generated by the AI Design Assistant can only be added to a NILE course once it has been approved by academic staff teaching on the module, and all AI generated suggestions can be edited by staff before being made available to students.
Please note that the AI Design Assistant cannot create teaching and learning materials (i.e., course content). While it can prove very helpful in the creation of activities to support teaching and learning (e.g., generating test questions from specific course content items to use as knowledge checks, formative tests/quizzes, self-test 'how am I doing?' type questions for students), it will not generate teaching and learning materials. It is also important to recognise that due to the inherent limitations of AI, anything generated by AI will need to be carefully checked by a subject matter expert before being approved for use in a course.
AI Design Assistant has been created by Anthology in partnership with Microsoft, and you can find out more about their commitment to responsible AI via the links below:
When using AI Design Assistant it is extremely important to bear in mind that it is a widely known and inherent feature of AI that it cannot get things right all of the time. Therefore, any suggestions made by the AI Design Assistant must be checked for sense and accuracy by staff who are subject matter experts and who understand in detail the teaching, learning, and assessment strategy in use on the module.
What the AI Design Assistant can do:
What the AI Design Assistant cannot do:
The most important thing to bear in mind if and when using AI Design Assistant is that it has no understanding of what it is doing, and that it is merely generating ideas/suggestions that you may or may not like to use. No suggestions can be generated by AI in a NILE course without being asked for by a member of academic staff, and no AI generated suggestions can appear in an Ultra course unless they are first checked, refined if necessary, and approved by the member of staff who generated them.
There are ten levels of complexity for AI-generated content:
| Complexity | Description (US) | Approx. UK Equivalent |
| 1 | Early primary school | KS1 (Primary School, Ages 5 - 7) |
| 2 | Late primary school | KS2 (Primary School, Ages 7 - 11) |
| 3 | Early middle school | KS3 (Secondary School, Ages 11 - 12) |
| 4 | Late middle school | KS3 (Secondary School, Ages 13 - 14) |
| 5 | Early high school | KS4 / Levels 1 & 2 / GCSE (Ages 15 -16) |
| 6 | Late high school | Level 3 / A Level / Foundation (Ages 17 - 18) |
| 7 | Undergraduate lower division | Level 4 - 5 (Undergraduate Years 1 - 2) |
| 8 | Undergraduate upper division | Level 5 - 6 (Undergraduate Years 2 - 3) |
| 9 | Graduate level | Level 7 (Master's) |
| 10 | Advanced PhD level | Level 8 (PhD) |
Before using any of the AI Design Assistant tools, please ensure that you are familiar with the limitations of the tool (see 'Benefits and limitations of AI Design Assistant' above), in particular, the fact that all auto-generated content must be checked for accuracy and bias before being used in a NILE course.
For more information about the limitations of AI, in particular the generation of inaccurate information and the reproduction and amplification of existing biases and stereotypes, see: When AI Gets It Wrong: Addressing AI Hallucinations and Bias
AI Design Assistant can offer suggestions about the structure of NILE courses by auto-generating learning modules. The auto-generate module feature will create a number of learning modules at the top level of your NILE course, adding titles, images, and descriptions the learning modules it generates. You can choose how many learning modules you want the design assistant to generate, the complexity (i.e., difficulty) of the course, the prefix (e.g., week, topic, unit, etc), and whether to auto-generate images and descriptions for the learning modules.
By default, the design assistant will only use the NILE course title when generating course structure suggestions, but if you add in more information about the course into the description field - e.g., information from the module specification such as the module description, indicative content, module learning outcomes - the auto-generated modules will be more relevant. The ‘Select course items’ option can also be used to specify exactly which resources should be used when auto-generating learning modules. If ‘Select course items’ is used, the auto-generated learning modules will be based only upon the items selected.
You can re-generate the learning modules multiple times, so do not have to go with the first set of suggestions. You can also edit the auto-generated modules, so if you just want a number of learning modules with images in your course, you might find that auto-generating them is a quick option, and after they are generated you can add in your own titles and descriptions.
To auto-generate learning modules:
Wherever you can add an image in an Ultra course, as well as being able to upload an image from your computer, you can also add Unsplash images. And, in many places in Ultra courses, you will be able to add AI-generated images too. Unsplash is a library of photographs, whereas AI-generated images are unique images created from a description. Both Unsplash and AI-generated images are freely available to use in NILE Ultra courses.
To add an Unsplash or AI image to your Ultra course:
When describing an AI-generated image, you a providing an instruction to an AI image generator to create you a unique set of images based on your description. Every time you generate the images, they will be different, even if you use precisely the same description. The more information that you provide in the description about what you want your image to look like, the more likely you are to get an image that is close to one that you want. As well as describing the content of the image, you can also add information about the style of the image too. The following screenshots show how varied AI-generated images can be. Each used the same content description, 'deep in thought', but in the second and third screenshots additional information about the style was added.
There are two ways to generate test questions using the AI Design Assistant:
Ideas for Ultra test questions can generated from within an Ultra test. The auto-generated test questions will use the name of your NILE course as a prompt, but adding additional information to the description field and re-generating the questions will make them more specific. The ‘Select course items’ option can also be used to specify exactly which resources should be used when auto-generating test questions. If ‘Select course items’ is used, the auto-generated test questions will be based only upon the items selected. The 'Select course items' option may be especially useful for staff wanting to create multiple tests, each based on one or more specific content items in the course, or for staff wanting to create a longer test built up from multiple auto-generated questions from different sections of the course, thus ensuring that the test represents questions testing students' knowledge from across the entire course.
Once generated and added to the test, the auto-generated questions can then be manually edited. Auto-generate test questions can be used multiple times within the same test in order to build up a longer test composed of multiple questions of different types from various different prompts and sources.
To auto-generate test questions:
Ideas for banks of test questions can generated from within the Ultra question bank. The auto-generated questions will use the name of your NILE course as a prompt, but adding additional information to the description field and re-generating the questions will make them more specific. The ‘Select course items’ option can also be used to specify exactly which course resources should be used when auto-generating test questions. If ‘Select course items’ is used, the auto-generated test questions will be based only upon the items selected. The 'Select course items' option may be especially useful for staff wanting to create multiple question banks, each based on one or more specific content items in the course, or for staff wanting to create multiple banks of questions each built up from multiple auto-generated questions from different sections of the course, thus creating a large collection of question banks from across the entire course.
Once generated and added to the question bank, the auto-generated questions can then be manually edited, and auto-generate can be used multiple times order to build up a large collection of question banks which can then be used in one or more Ultra tests using the question pool question type. The question pool allows a specified number of test questions to be drawn from a larger pool, meaning that each time the test is taken it will be composed of different questions.
To auto-generate banks of test questions :
Ideas for assignments, discussions, and journals can be auto-generated when setting these up in an Ultra course. The assignment, discussion, and journal prompts are designed to encourage students to engage in higher-order thinking, to apply their knowledge, to justify or challenge their beliefs and ideas, and emulate real-world situations.
To auto-generate ideas for an Ultra assignment, discussion or journal:
Ideas for Ultra rubrics can generated from the gradebook settings panel. By default, the AI generated rubrics will be fairly generic, but adding detail about your assessment to the description field and re-generating the rubric will make it more specific to your assignment. Once generated, the AI-generated rubric can then be manually edited.
To auto-generate a rubric:
An AI conversation is a Socratic questioning exercise guided by AI which lets your students explore their thoughts on a topic.
There are two elements to an AI conversation activity:
To create an AI conversation:
On submission, you can review the AI conversation transcript and your students' reflections. Please note that the AI conversation is a formative assessment by default, but you change this if you want to.
