Campus Technology Insider Podcast August 2024
Listen: Streamlining Instructional Design with Generative AI
Rhea Kelly 00:07
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
As both instructional designers and adjunct faculty members at Northeast Iowa Community College, Shannon Brenner and Jordan O'Connell have a close-up view of generative AI from both perspectives. Gen AI tools have both transformed the course-building process and changed the game for interacting with students and assessing their coursework. For this episode of the podcast, we talked about generative AI's impact on instructional design and teaching, navigating acceptable use of AI, strategies for helping faculty make the most of AI, and more. Here's our chat.
Hi Shannon and Jordan. Welcome to the podcast.
Shannon Brenner 00:58
Thanks for having us.
Jordan O'Connell 01:00
Hi. Thank you.
Rhea Kelly 01:02
So to start off, I think it's always great to have you introduce yourself and kind of talk about your role. I understand you're both instructional designers but also adjunct professors, so I'm very curious about what that's like.
Shannon Brenner 01:17
All right, I'll go first. I'm Shannon Brenner. I am an instructional designer for Northeast Iowa Community College, and as you said, an adjunct faculty member. So in my full-time role as an instructional designer, I help faculty build courses and design courses. We also help them with instructional support, and we do a lot of trainings on instructional technology, AI, things like that, and we help the college with other initiatives as well — assessment and all sorts of other things. As an adjunct instructor, I teach courses in the communications area, primarily composition and also our first-year college experience course.
Jordan O'Connell 02:00
And I work closely with Shannon as an instructional designer at Northeast Iowa Community College as well. I started a year or two before her, kind of in the throes of COVID, and so that's how I was sort of introduced to the work and the importance of the work of instructional design. Longtime instructor, longtime community college instructor. I teach in different disciplines from Shannon: I teach in humanities, history, political science, yeah, in three, three different community colleges over the past 12 or 13 years. I've grown a lot, I like taking on new roles. And the instructional design role is neat because it allows me to sort of see behind the curtain, both of learning management systems like D2L Brightspace, but then I start to apply what I learned and see what others are doing too in their courses, within my own courses. And so it's challenged me to grow as an instructor as well.
Rhea Kelly 02:44
So we're here to talk about generative AI. In a broad way, how has generative AI changed your approach to instructional design?
Shannon Brenner 02:54
How much time do you have? It has changed everything. As far as instructional design goes, it's made a lot of what we do a lot more efficient, right? So when we were building questions. maybe, maybe from an instructor, into our LMS, which is D2L Brightspace, before, one question at a time. Now we are able to do that by having an AI tool create a CSV file that's already formatted correctly for us to import directly into our LMS, or using tools like D2L's Lumi, which allows us to generate quiz questions based on content within the course. So both of those things make it much, much faster and easier to build content in a course, and it's also kind of expanded what we can do. So, for example, sometimes we hire adjuncts at our college, and it might take up until shortly before the semester starts to get them on board. And we are able to, in the background, even without a subject-matter expert readily available, we can start to get some basic content together in a course, even in an area that we may not know much about. And so with the help of open educational resources and AI tools like Lumi, we can get quizzes built and maybe some basic discussion prompts and assignment ideas and things like that ready to go. And then once the instructor gets in, they can customize and tailor to their needs.