AI in Learning: A look at upcoming features within our institutional educational technologies

Posted on: 19 September 2024 by Will Moindrot and Rob Lindsay in General

More and more AI is being introduced to enable new ways to do things and opening up new areas of understanding. The same is true for our educational technologies with Instructure (makers of our institutional VLE ‘Canvas’).

They announced that they will also be developing a number of AI-enabled features to be introduced into Canvas over the coming few years with a focus on features that save educator’s time. Many of us will already be using Generative AI (Chat GPT and co) in our day-to-day work, but this move signifies the unification of GAI into our core suite of tools for teaching and learning. The opportunity to bring disruptive technology such as AI into the classroom also presents opportunities to increase the digital capabilities of ourselves and our students through awareness and experience.

It’s worth saying that many of these features are made available on an institutional ‘opt-in’ process, with overall decisions guided by our DEAG (Digital Education Advisory Group). The aim of this blog article then is to start conversations about some of these features, identify functionality we look forward to and other areas that we would need to more actively engage with in order to better fit these to our needs.

We’d very much like to continue the conversation, in our individual teams, or our Digital Education Network (DEN) or Canvas Connect community at an institution level.

Upcoming Canvas Features (all plans tentative and open to change)

Discussion Board summaries

Expected later this year, a tool designed to save you time and giving new insight by providing textual summaries of discussion board activity, for example a synopsis of discussion or highlighting common themes or issues arising. We could imagine this being incredibly useful for staff carrying out moderation on courses that are heavy on discussion boards or have large cohorts where discussion is divided into separate groups. The feature appears initially aimed at staff only, although it would be one short and useful step for the tutor to use it to produce class-wide feedback/tutoring based upon the summary.

If you already use tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Bing this is already possible! Copilot within Microsoft Edge browser (button highlighted in screenshot) will even work with any webpage that you already have open, including Canvas Discussions, giving page summaries or answers to any other question you can think of related to the material.

AI-powered content translation

Automatic translation of all human-written text to a reader’s preferred language, increasing the accessibility of content to students and staff for whom English may not be a first language. There are many existing tools for this (including Microsoft PowerPoint), but having these tools situated directly within Canvas could help drive greater engagement and give greater control to educators. As with automated transcription tools there can be inaccuracies with their output, or be inclined towards biases, so it may be important for us to take an active role in shaping how they are developed/trained, and as a priority discuss with our students the role, dangers and benefits of these assistive tools.

Smart Search

With Atomic Search tool we have had a powerful search tool integrated into our Canvas since day one. This allows students and staff to search by keyword for content in items and files from across their Canvas enrolments. Going forward, Instructure has indicated that they would like to develop their own search tool, initially limited to only search content in Pages and discussion, but with a longer-term aim of developing an overall AI model to power things such as an intelligent/conversational search interface. This could be useful tool returning personalised search results based upon what the system knows about the students’ needs or informed by other analytical data. Again we may need to anticipate potential biases, but it does seem that it could have the potential to enrich the student experience, surface hidden resources and connections, and put student more in-control of their learning using a data-led approach.

Content writing assistant

We may see an upgrade to the ‘Rich Content Editor’ in Canvas (used for creation of Announcements, Pages, Assignment summaries, Discussion Boards etc.) with the introduction of an AI-powered writing assistant to help us compose our textual content. This could be useful as a starting point for structuring narrative around an activity, or restructuring content in a more easily accessible and engaging way. We’ve found GAI to be a valuable timesaver for staff looking to make more effective use of Canvas - see section Generative AI Prompts for Canvas – and with the introduction of this feature directly in Canvas more of our staff and students can explore this functionality. As with other disruptive tools we may want to reflect on this as a source of learning: consider how we use it, over-reliance, and issues around originality and authenticity. A useful starting position for use to have the same conversation with our students about AI within their own work.

Digital assistants

(Image source: Praxis AI https://education.praxis-ai.com/)

These are AI ‘digital assistants’ which provide an ongoing 24/7 source of personalised support within a single Canvas course or across our Canvas tenancy for our students. Instructure has not indicated in-house development in this area, but they have showcased partnership with other companies that provide this functionality in Canvas. One of these companies, Praxis have showcased a tool that takes the role of a ‘Digital Twin’, which is built on a LLM (large language model) refined for academic use, with a high degree of customisation including whitelisting of ‘trusted sources’. Deep integration with Canvas makes training on Canvas course materials very easy to do. An InstructureCon presentation highlighted how one institution employed the tool as a ‘digital professor’: a personality and behaviours defined to the role of an auxiliary advising tutor; trained on specific materials but willingness to recommend and interface with existing campus provision; an additional member of the team rather than replacement or clone of faculty.

Some of this is already possible. OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) already provide a platform where educators can construct and train their own GPTs with ease and provide these for their students to use as a course resource, as demonstrated by CIE colleague Rob Lindsay in this video ‘Engaging with Custom GPTs’. Want to give this a spin? Contact cie@liverpool.ac.uk.

Have a look at this recording by CIE’s Ben Mcgrae from our GenAI Fest to see screenshots of some of these new features Generative AI embedded in Canvas and accessibility support (29mins in).

Generative AI Prompts for Canvas

Here are just a few ways you can use Chat GPT, Gemini, CoPilot or another GAI tool of your choice to improve your Canvas content:

• “Help me think of an image to use for my Canvas welcome page/dashboard tile that sums up my course for undergraduate students on [subject]” The Creative Commons search portal is great for locating free-to-use images, but you sometimes need help getting ideas of what to search for.
• “Help me write an ambitious but easy to read mission statement for my level 7 module aimed at a diverse student group based upon these aims….” GAI can help us to get out of the rut of academese learning outcomes and give inspiration to describe our work in a way that engages different perspectives.
• “Help me write an exciting activity summary for this assignment/exercise that I can include in Canvas..” Tutor narrative in Canvas that describe and prepares students for learning activities is an effective way to improve engagement and learning outcomes, and GAI can be a huge timesaver. You can even specify frameworks for your narrative such as eTivity Invitations for it to use, and you can maintain a conversation about your specific module for you to use as the module progresses.

Have you found other highly effective ways to employ generative AI in your teaching? Start a conversation within your team or reach out to the Digital Education Network (DEN) or Canvas Connect to share.

In other Ed Tech:

H5P ‘Smart Import’

H5P is a tool used for the creation of interactive learning resources that can be embedded within Canvas content. We’ve been piloting H5P at the University for a few years (H5P Pilot - Examples from the University so far). Our license for H5P includes ‘Smart Import’ which allows users to upload their own content (documents, presentations, videos etc.) and the system will interpret that content and then automatically produce a range of different H5P activities such as quizzes. Academic users have so far found this to be a timesaver in creating new resources or for quickly converting existing content into interactive online activities.  Students feed back that the interactive nature of H5P gives them a better grasp of concepts and is an inclusive supplement to traditional lectures “the structure of these interactive lectures is great - they take slightly longer, but they’re easier to do because I’m actively listening and engaging and don’t get distracted as easily”. The University has a legal contract with H5P to safeguard our data (not shared with any other company or used to train LLM), so we are pleased to invite new user of H5P to give it a try during our SMARTember event in September. Otherwise please contact cie@liverpool.ac.uk to get started.

Mentimeter

This polling technology used commonly as a classroom engagement or surveying tool now includes a number of AI-powered features. Within the synchronous classroom it can be particularly useful for live analysis of participant responses, for example word clouds that are generated dynamically through instant thematic analysis. There are also features to speed up the process of question writing with a presentation builder that will suggest draft survey questions based upon an area of your research, as evidenced by Dr Na Li (XJTLU) at our recent GenAI Fest ‘Using GenAI for Research’ (23mins in). We are reaching out to PollEverywhere (the institutional polling platform) to find out about its plans for AI.

Padlet

Padlet has a similar feature to Mentimeter with ‘AI Recipes’ to help you quickly draft an activity space. They also have a ‘Safety Net’ Auto-moderation feature which will intelligently scan entered content for inappropriate content, useful for where students have open access (without account) to contribute to a board. (It’s probably still worth referring all students to KnowHow’s excellent resource on Creating a Positive Online Presence).