Sometimes, your team needs to build a training course from scratch — like yesterday!
This pressure may come from a change in the marketplace, new regulations and legislation, or a new strategic direction for your organization.
Fortunately, there’s new technology that can come to your rescue.
It’s called generative artificial intelligence (AI), and unless you were spelunking for the last year, you’ve noted how much discussion and disruption it’s provoked.
Generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, will forever change the way you develop course content. By producing quality text, images, and even videos in short time frames, generative AI will save your organization many hours of heavy lifting in course content development and help scale your catalog at a cost-efficient pace you may have only dreamed of.
Here’s how.
Brainstorming with AI
When developing a new online course, you may sit with your team for hours trying to answer questions such as:
- What are the learning objectives of this course?
- What kind of learners are we targeting?
- What are the constraints and resources we have to work with?
- What is the outline of the material we need to cover?
- What topics are critical to cover in this field?
All of these questions can be answered quickly by generative AI through prompts written in natural language. Prompts are the questions you ask generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) to get the information you need.
Working with prompts
Just as in a conversation with a friend during which you’re learning about a topic, the answers will vary depending on the questions you’re asking. Similarly, the quality of answers ChatGPT delivers will vary as your conversation with the tool evolves.
Prompt writing requires a little practice. The Internet offers numerous free resources that can help guide you in the structuring of your prompts.
Don’t let the small investment of study time put you off. It’s an investment that will keep paying off in time saved, not only in course development but in all the content you produce in your professional life, like emails, reports, proposals, and so on.
Analysis and instructional design
Once your AI-powered tool delivers a general framework for your course, you should review and edit it to ensure it meets your needs. Ask yourself: Does each of the learning modules support the learning objectives of the course? Is each module divided into individual lessons? Will this breakdown of the content be manageable for my trainees?
While your AI tool can accelerate the development of content, remember that these computing marvels can still make errors of fact and even invent “facts.” So your judgment and vigilance are essential to ensure the content is correct and meaningful to your learners at all stages of your content development.
AI-generated course materials
With a framework of lessons in hand, you can then fill out the framework with content generated by AI.
For example, let’s look at text content. Your generative AI tool can carry out the following tasks:
- Source comprehensive information on a topic
- Simplify long texts into bite-sized learning
- Create engaging summaries of content or appealing course descriptions and titles that will promote course enrollment.
- Tag your course content with the right keywords so your LMS search tool can surface the courses your learners are looking for.
AI-created visual elements to enhance course engagement
Parallel to the development of text for your course, your AI-powered tools, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, can work from your prompts to create fresh images and other visuals that help raise engagement with your course materials.
These AI-powered tools can also save you hours in visual searches by carrying out image recognition.
Beyond still images, text-to-video generators, such as OpenAI’s Sora, have produced sharp short videos. It’s important to note that AI tools for creating and editing sophisticated videos are still in their infancy but evolving quickly.
Once you’ve assembled all the raw materials of your course content, you’ll need to edit, polish, and fact-check it. Moreover, stay alert to material that may inadvertently infringe on copyrights or leak private data.
AI-generated assessments
Naturally, no course content is complete without thoughtful assessments that support learning. Again, AI tools can come to your rescue. In minutes, your AI-powered tool can produce relevant questions that challenge your learners at the appropriate level of difficulty, based on the parameters of your course and preferences.
Making your new course LMS-ready with AI
At the last stage of your course development, you can use AI-powered tools to prep your content for upload to your LMS. As discussed above, your AI tools have already generated enticing course summaries and titles as well as identified your new content with relevant tags so that your learners can easily find it in the LMS.
To enhance the credibility of your course, an AI tool can easily collect information in the public domain about your instructors and weave a text based on their qualifications and achievements.
With AI-powered tools at your disposal, you’ll save your team tons of hours and dramatically shorten the time-to-launch of your course.
With these time-savings in your favor, you can work even more cost-efficiently with your team to drive the rapid expansion of your LMS catalog.
To get started with offering online courses, request your free demo of uxpertise LMS.
