Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made a remarkable shift from being a concept of science fiction films, to a tool used in various industries, and now integrating itself into our everyday lives. But there still exists controversies on its use, as students have been found to be abusing tools like ChatGPT to write their essays, and AI image generators like LENSA are being accused of plagiarising artists’ work.
However, the fact remains that AI can be very beneficial and the way of the future, and with mindful use, it can help you work more efficiently and enhance your eLearning projects.
The following are just some of the AI tools available that learning designers can take advantage of in the development of their courses.
CHATGPT (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt)
What is probably the most popular AI currently out there, ChatGPT is a powerful language generation model that is trained to provide human-like responses based on inputted prompts. But it can be used for much more than just answering simple queries, and with the right prompts, this includes helping to create the framework for your course in terms of defining themes and subtopics, and gathering content relevant to the learning objectives. With its advanced capabilities in natural language processing, anyone can easily use ChatGPT to greatly speed up their content creation process. However, do take note that the AI is designed to answer naturally, but not necessarily correctly. And when it can be convinced to say 2 plus 2 equals 5, its factual responses should not be taken at face value.
QUILLBOT (https://quillbot.com/)
The idea might be there, but something about your sentence structure just isn’t working. Enter QuillBot, which will not only paraphrase your sentences, but provides different options of speech styles such as formal, simple or creative, depending on the tone you want to convey. It can shorten or expand your sentence. It also functions as a grammar checker, inspecting your text for spelling mistakes and other grammatical issues. This is a useful tool to help you express your words better and improve your English at the same time.
ELEVENLABS (https://beta.elevenlabs.io/)
Robotic text-to-speech voices may soon be a thing of the past. This AI speech software generates high quality audio that are rich with the natural intonations and inflections found in the human voice. Rather than focusing on sentences, the AI takes a look at the bigger whole to adjust speech delivery based on context. You can also create custom voices from samples, your own voice, or even generate completely new voices with their toolkit.
SYNTHESIA (https://www.synthesia.io/)
Don’t have an instructor or actor to be a presenter in your course? No worries, just use AI. Synthesia is a video creation tool that has a stock library of over 125 AI talking avatars that you can choose from to create professional-looking videos that can engage your learners. It is easier, faster and more cost-effective than traditional methods. They also provide a diverse selection of age, gender, race, as well as languages and accents so you can choose the best fit avatar for your needs.
ChatDOC (https://chatdoc.com/)
During the research phase for your course, you may be faced with large documents of reference materials and just no time to go through everything page by page. What can you do? ChatDOC allows you to upload pdf files of up to 150 pages and it can quickly extract, locate and summarise the information for you. You can also ask specific questions about the content and it will provide easy to understand answers in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, it is able to understand tables and texts, and can present you with an analysis of the data. The possibilities with AI are endless. While these early stages of development means that users may sometimes need to be technically savvy to get the responses or outputs they desire, it is only going to get better and easier with time. While it is not necessary to use AI, it can help you in gaining insights, stimulate your thinking, streamline your processes and ultimately improve your bottom line. To benefit from what the wonders of technology have created, be sure to explore these tools today.