Blackboard AI Design Assistant
The Blackboard AI Design Assistant leverages artificial intelligence to provide instructors with a starting point for building course content by offering recommendations directly within Blackboard Ultra. The generative AI draws from course-specific data including course name, existing materials, and instructor written prompts to provide suggestions regarding course structure, assessments, and grading rubrics. Utilizing the generative AI within Blackboard Ultra ensures intellectual property and data stays within the institution.
Key Features
Organization
- Build the course structure by generating learning modules that support course learning objectives, concepts, or themes. Each generated module can include a name, image, description, and prefix (i.e. week, module, unit, etc).
- Design layouts for Ultra Documents that include images, knowledge checks, and headings.
Images
- Generate new images to use for Learning Modules thumbnails and in Ultra Document layouts.
- Recommend royalty-free images from the Unsplash library, based on AI-generated keywords.
- Provide a starting point for writing Alt-Text for images.
Assessments
Generate test questions and prompts for assignments, discussions, and journals based on course content including Ultra Documents and files uploaded into the course (i.e. syllabus). Please note the AI will NOT draw from external sources like websites or textbooks.
- Generate individual tests or larger question banks from a variety of question types including essay, fill in the blank, jumbled sentence, matching, multiple choice, and true/false.
- Suggest prompts for Assignments, Discussions, and Journals that are aligned with appropriate cognitive levels from Bloom's Taxonomy and course complexity.
- Engage students in dialogue and reflection with AI Conversation. Each AI conversation includes two parts; the students' interaction with the AI persona
and a written reflection where students can share their thoughts on the activity and
flag any bias or errors from the AI. There are currently two types of AI Conversations.
- Socratic Questioning - encourages students to think critically through continuous questioning.
- Role-Play - allows students to act out a scenario or case study with a faculty created AI persona.
- Build rubrics to use for grading assessments based on course content (i.e. assignment directions) and additional instructor prompts.
Things to Consider
Benefits
- Can be useful for brainstorming new ideas.
- Safeguards Intellectual Property by ensuring that data stays within the organization.
- Supports a variety of language outputs.
Limitations
- Effectiveness depends heavily on the quality and specificity of prompts or initial data.
- Subject to bias.
- Potential risk for course to lack a personalized or student-centered design.
Recommendations
- Instructors are encouraged to thoroughly review any generative AI in their course and make revisions as needed.
- Instructors should be open with students about their use of generative AI in the course.
- Instructors are encouraged to create an AI policy in their syllabus regarding student use of AI.
For more information about the Blackboard AI Design Assistant please reach out to your Instructional Designer or attend one of our scheduled workshops.