Personalised and inclusive online courses using GenAI
Lead institution: The Open University UK
Country: United Kingdom
Project primary contact: Christothea Herodotou (christothea.herodotou@open.ac.uk), Professor of learning technologies and social justice
Project secondary contact: Denise Whitelock, Chris Edwards, Thomas Ullmann and Duygu Bektik
Project Title: Personalised and inclusive online courses using GenAI
The project is: In progress
Project Summary:
The Institute of Educational Technology, at the Open University UK is piloting ways it can use GenAI to support curriculum production, specifically the creation of personalised and inclusive online courses that respond to individual learning needs.
It has completed scoping work reviewing relevant international literature and proposing conceptual approaches of how AI and Humans may work together to produce high quality teaching material and activities for online learners. To overcome criticism of GenAI using copyrighted online resources, it has instead used Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to generate content only from institutional resources.
Pilot results showed that, at the moment, the human contribution is critical to act as a final reviewer and approval of AI outputs, as these require checking and adjustment. Humans contributed to improving the accuracy of the content and made it more suitable to the university context and teaching philosophy. Our approach makes use of best practice in producing online modules such as the Open University Learning Design framework, the Inclusive Curriculum Tool and the Curriculum Management Guide.
Impact: Generate courses that personalise to the needs of individual students and help them progress and succeed.
Audience: Online learners
This output is part of a member project - AI Garage: Creating the Future Now which collects and curates cutting-edge practice examples of AI. You can explore other submissions here.