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Enhance your course with generative AI

Generative AI has the potential to enhance and optimise your course and course material. You can use it to create and refine course material, generate course-specific media and test your course with simulated students. You can also provide more frequent feedback. More advanced utilisation might be possible in the future, if generative AI is more deeply integrated into existing systems at KTH, like Canvas.

This page will focus on how you as a teacher can improve your course, the course material and your feedback to the students. For information about using generative AI to improve students' learning experience, go to the page Personalise learning with generative AI .

Create and improve course material with generative AI

New and old course material can both benefit from generative AI, as explained in more detail under the following headings.

Note! Remember to review and customise the AI-generated outputs to ensure they align with your pedagogical approach and the specific needs of your students.

Brainstorm new material

Generative AI can be an invaluable tool for brainstorming, which is especially useful when creating new material. Ask a generative AI application for suggestions for material that fits your course and learning outcomes. You will likely have to keep working on the material created by the AI, but it will help you get started. You can refine the suggestions on your own or with the continued use of the generative AI application.

For example, you can use a generative AI to get suggestions for:

  • course structure, by giving the AI the course’s key topics and learning outcomes
  • suitable learning activities for a topic
  • questions for quizzes and exercises
  • how to vary mock exam questions
  • scripts for course videos
  • realistic examples of a topic, formula or phenomena.

Refine or complement existing material

Your existing course material can benefit from generative AI; they do more than create entirely new content. A generative AI can enhance your materials' clarity, engagement, and coherence by, for example, making a text more reader-friendly or suggesting complementing discussion topics.

Tip!

Check the quality of the output of popular generative AI applications, even if you do not use them. Remember that your students might use them, but they lack your expertise in judging the quality of the output. Consider checking ChatGPT (free account required, chat.openai.com) .

For example, you can use a generative AI to:

  • place descriptive headers in your texts
  • rewrite a text in plain language
  • highlight strengths and weaknesses in your course material and suggest improvements
  • create complementing discussion or quiz question
  • highlight the connection between the current topic and a previous topic
  • generate alternative explanations or analogies
  • summarize lengthy texts such as research papers or textbook chapters.

Create course-specific media

Finding media that fits your specific course can be a hassle or not worth the time. However, with generative AI, you can easily create images, videos and audio to your specifications. You can use the generated material on its own or supplement your existing material, for example, by adding an image or animation to a text. There are many tools available that only require text instructions (prompts) to create media, such as DALL-E or Midjourney, so you do not need to know how to edit the media yourself.

Note that since this technology is new, there are areas that require improvement. For example, generative AI only sometimes creates the correct number of fingers or teeth. Always review the output from the AI before using it in your course.

Test your course and lessons with AI

It is difficult to predict if your course will work as intended before the students interact with it, as every teacher knows. It is unsustainable to test every course with real students, but testing your course with generative AI is relatively simple.  

Generative AI can simulate students with different levels of understanding and motivation, which you can use to test your course. For example, the AI can generate hypothetical student reactions, questions, or concerns that align with the intended students' level of knowledge. Of course, you will need to make some assumptions about the students that might or might not be correct. Nevertheless, this method will hopefully help you anticipate potential issues, gaps in understanding, or unclear areas in your course material.

For example, test your practice or exam questions by asking a generative AI to answer them "as a first year engineering student" or "as a master student with dyslexia". You could also provide the AI with a lesson plan and ask it if it can find some issues or ask if the plan is coherent or not. There are a lot of different ways to use it, try and see what works best for you and your course. Read more about how to use it purposefully in the section "Write purposeful prompts" on the page Use generative AI efficiently .

Be extra careful and use an AI where you can opt out of it saving your data if you are testning your own, original material. This to make sure your material is not used to train the model or in any other way that you might not approve of.

Further reading 

General: 

Automatic feedback to teachers: