This month’s blog post was contributed by Shannon Brenner, Instructional Designer & Adjunct Faculty at Northeast Iowa Community College.

If you work in education, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has likely become one of your daily conversation topics. While much of that conversation probably centers around student use of AI, it is important to start thinking about how we, as educators, can incorporate AI into our daily work practices. Not only does AI make our work more efficient, it has the potential to create tailored educational tools that can meet the needs of our current learners at the moment. 

Educators who utilize Open Educational Resources (OER) have a distinct advantage when it comes to utilizing AI. We can feed openly-licensed content into large language models such as ChatGPT (or one of the dozens of other AI tools that emerge every week), and create customized materials without the fear of copyright issues. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what you can do with the combination of AI and OER. 

What AI tool should I use?

New AI tools are announced on a daily basis. 

ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, was the first open large language model to hit the market, and is still one of the most commonly used tools. They offer free and paid versions (about $20 per month), both of which will work to create your materials, though the free version may have some limitations. Microsoft has added AI functionality to its Bing chat search engine. Canva, a popular design website, has added AI functionality to its platform as well. Additionally, there are many AI tools being developed specifically for educators, such as Brisk AI. I recommend starting with the free version of ChatGPT. Once you feel comfortable with it, check out a few of the others to see what you like best. I used the paid version of ChatGPT which is what I will use to demonstrate in this post. 

How does it work?

Let’s say that you want to create a study guide for your students to help them prepare for an exam on a unit of your course. Your first step will be to choose an AI tool such as ChatGPT and input a prompt. Your prompt might look something like this (and will likely need some tweaking until you get it just right):

At this point, I pasted an entire section from this OpenStax Biology textbook and hit enter. This is a snippet of the guide that ChatGPT created for me. The entire process took about 15 seconds.

After I got the content, I asked ChatGPT to provide the HTML code for the study guide. 

Notice the “copy code” button in the upper right corner. I was able to copy this study guide HTML code and add it to a new HTML file in my school’s Learning Management System. The gif below shows how fast and smooth this process was. What would take me close to an hour without the help of AI now takes less than five minutes. 

For more examples and a walkthrough of the prompting process, check out the AI Chatbot Prompting episode of my department’s YouTube channel, Pixelated Pedagogy. 

What can I make with AI and my OER materials?

Once you have a basic understanding of how to write a prompt, you can use your OER materials to create just about anything for your courses. The list below is certainly not exhaustive, but should give you some ideas as to where you might start. 

Learning Materials

• Chapter notes
• Study guides
• Slide decks
• Worksheets
• Assignments
• Discussion prompts

Student Resources

• Study tips
• Time management resources
• Reading guides

Assessment & Feedback

• Question banks
• Essay prompts
• Project guidelines
• Rubrics
• Feedback templates

Teaching Aids

• Lecture notes
• Answer keys
• Resource sheets
• Class communications

Disclaimer: AI and Copyright

It is important to note that, at the time of this writing, AI-generated content is not considered to be openly-licensed. This means that we can use the content, but we cannot make it available to the public with a Creative Commons license. You can learn more about AI and copyright guidelines on the Creative Commons website. 

If you’re interested in creating content with the help of AI chatbots, check out this GenAI Chatbot Prompt Library for Educators to get started.