While many educators spent the past two years fretting that artificial intelligence is killing student writing, upending person-to-person tutoring and generally wreaking havoc on scholastic inquiry, the well-known thinker and ed tech expert Michael Feldstein has been quietly exploring something completely different.
For more than a year, he has led an open-source project with a group of about 70 educators online to build what’s essentially a chat bot with one job: to guide teachers, step-by-step, through the process of designing their own courses — a privilege previously reserved for just a few instructors at elite institutions.
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The experimental software, dubbed the AI Learning Design Assistant, or ALDA, has yet to hit the market. But when it does, Feldstein said, it will be free. With any luck, it could mark a new era, offering teachers at all levels an easy way to design their own homegrown coursework, assessments and even curricula at a fraction of the cost demanded by commercial publishers. Feldstein has worked primarily with college instructors, and his work is widely applicable in higher ed. But it’s got potential in K-12 education as well.
AI is interesting because there are many possible answers. That makes the question harder to answer. Nevertheless, we need to answer it.
Michael Feldstein, co-creator of ALDA
He’s pushing to democratize instructional design, a little-known academic field in which professional designers build courses by working backwards: They interview teachers to help them drill down to what’s important, then create courses based on the findings.
When it’s ready, he said, ALDA could well shake up the teaching profession, making off-the-shelf AI behave like a personal instructional designer for virtually every teacher who wants one.
And for the record, Feldstein said, there’s an acute shortage of such designers, so this particular iteration of AI likely won’t put anyone out of a job.
‘What is this good for?’
Feldstein is well-known in the ed tech community, having worked over the years at Oracle, Cengage Learning and elsewhere. A one-time assistant director of the State University of New York’s Learning Network, he has more recently garnered a wide audience with his e-literate blog — required reading for college instructors and ed tech experts.
Over the past few years, Feldstein has likened tools such as ChatGPT and AI image generators like Midjourney to “toys in both good and bad ways.” They invite people to play and give players the ability to explore what’s basically cutting-edge AI. “It’s fun. And, like all good games, you learn by playing,” he wrote recently.
But he cautions that when they’re asked to do something specific, they “tend to do weird things” such as return strange results and, on occasion, hallucinate.
As a longtime observer of ed tech, Feldstein’s approach has always been to step back and ask: What is this good for?
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“AI is interesting because there are many possible answers, and those answers change on a monthly basis as the capabilities change,” he said. That makes the question harder to answer. Nevertheless, we need to answer it.”
ALDA’s focus, he said, has always been on helping participants think more deeply about what teachers do: The AI probes students to find out what they know, then fills in the gaps.
“As an educator, if I ask you a question, I’m trying to understand if you know something,” he said. “So my question is directly related to a learning objective.”
By training, teachers naturally modify their questions to help figure out if students have misconceptions. They circle around the topic, offering clues, hints and feedback to help students home in on what they know. But they don’t simply give away the answer.
Over the course of the year, he and colleagues have broken down the various aspects of their work, including what they’d outsource if they had an assistant or “junior learning designer” at their side.
Excerpts of a conversation between an AI chatbot and a teacher who is in the process of designing a course. The open-source tool, AI Learning Design Assistant, or ALDA, is being co-developed by educator and blogger Michael Feldstein along with a small group of college instructors. (Courtesy of Michael Feldstein)
The AI starts simply, asking “Who are your students? What is your course about? What are the learning goals? What’s your teaching style?” It moves on from there: “What are the learning objectives for this lesson? How do you know when students have achieved those objectives? What are some common misconceptions they have?”
Eventually teachers can begin designing the course and its assessments with a clear focus on goals and, in the end, their own creativity.
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Feldstein holds decidedly modest goals for the project.
“The idea that we’re going to somehow invent a better AI model than these companies that are spending billions of dollars is crazy,” Feldstein said. But making course design accessible “is very doable and very useful.”
He has intentionally brought together a diverse group of instructors that includes both heavy AI users and skeptics. Among them: Paul Wilson, a longtime professor of religion and philosophy at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. Though Wilson has taught there for 32 years, he has dabbled in AI over the past few years as it reared its head in classes, assignments and faculty meetings.
He came away from Feldstein’s sessions over the past few months with the outlines of not one but two courses: a world religion survey, which he designed last summer, and a course in pastoral care. The latter, he said, is a “specialty class” for ministers-in-training who are getting their first taste of interacting with congregation members.
“They’re doing field work,” he said, “and this particular class is going to cover the functions they would have if they were serving in pastoral ministry.”
The course will cover everything from the business of running a congregation to the teaching and counseling duties of a pastor and the “prophetic” role — preaching and teaching the Bible, shepherding the congregation and offering spiritual guidance.
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Wilson said the AI let him tweak the course design in response to test users’ suggestions. “By the end, my experience was that I was working with something valuable,” he said. He is offering the class this semester.
“I got a very good course design, with all the parameters that I was looking for,” he said.
Geneva Dampare, director of strategy and operations at the United Negro College Fund, said the organization invited six instructors from five HBCUs to Feldstein’s workshop. Dampare, who has an instructional design background, joined as well.
Many faculty at these institutions, she said, don’t see AI as the menace that other instructors do. For them, it’s a kind of equalizer at colleges that don’t typically offer a perk like instructional designers.
But by the end of the process last November, Dampare said, many instructors “could comfortably speak about AI, speak about how they are integrating the ALDA tool into the curriculum development that they’re doing for next semester or future semesters.”
