Five ways to leverage AI tools for instructional design | UNSSC

With the United Nations (UN) renewed commitment to strengthening digital know-how and building modern digital capabilities in the Quintet of Change, now is the perfect time to familiarize ourselves with new digital technologies and learn to accomplish old tasks in new ways.

By cultivating this digital expertise, we can streamline current processes and innovate our way of doing things. In the areas of instructional design and e-learning development, AI tools can prove extremely useful in the following ways:

1. Sourcing content
   Content sources often come in different formats. Oftentimes these formats take the shape of hour-long video recordings of experts talking about the subject at hand. If the lengthy processes of transcribing audio files and interview recordings used to be tedious task, today AI tools can effortlessly help us capture those fundamental conversations and turn them into text format. Many video platforms are incorporating AI companions that allow us to transcribe in real time, as the interview or presentation is taking place. These innovations become very valuable in the social design e-learning development by capturing the knowledge of resource-persons and experts in fast and efficient ways.
2. Analyzing content
   Admittedly, even once we’ve converted all our sources of information into text, we are often left with several pages-long documents that require significant efforts to review and adapt into accessible learning content. With the right prompts, AI can analyze the text and translate those files into what we need.  What should this content be transformed into? How can we prompt AI into getting what we want out of it? That is where certain skills start to become essential, allowing us to leverage AI system’s capabilities to produce clear, relevant, and jargon-free content.
3. Designing programmes
   The key to utilizing AI tools in the design of learning programmes is, once again, prompting. By creating well-crafted prompts and building customized prompt libraries that address each of our different requirements, we can save weeks’ worth of work when adapting our content. AI tools, when used effectively, can carry out that same process in a matter of minutes. By taking advantage of that, learning designers can redirect their efforts and utilize their irreplaceable expertise to review what has been generated, re-prompt when needed, and apply all the appropriate modifications.
4. Creating visual materials
   Video and image generator systems such as DALL·E, Synthesia, Canva, and many others use deep learning networks to create realistic and enticing visual products that would have otherwise required significant time and costs to produce. These tools can be used both to develop customized videos, photographs and art to aesthetically improve the learning experience, or can even be a medium to create videos and infographics that communicate the course contents themselves.
5. Tailoring materials to different contexts
   In both e-learning and face to face programmes, AI tools are very valuable in helping us tailor courses in near-to-real time. If when conducting a course we realize that participants have any specific requests or objectives that have not been included in the initial curriculum, we can take advantage of the speediness of artificial intelligence to quicky develop a brief session tailored exactly to their needs and requests, allowing us to adapt their training right on the spot. Similarly, we can decide to develop scenarios and case studies relevant to all participants. So, the course can be customized in a quick and cost-efficient way, when it would have otherwise taken so much effort and resources that we might have instead chosen to reuse the same materials.

Like every other new tool, the correct and effective use of AI requires some learning, some trial and error, and a certain skillset.  Why should we spend weeks doing something that AI can easily do in two minutes?

Our time can be better spent reviewing the content AI produces and then using our expertise to edit, tweak and guide the tool in the right direction, to ensure it produces exactly what we want.

Anyone can open Chat GPT and ask it to write a page but knowing how to use it – or any other artificial intelligence system – to produce high-quality relevant products requires skill, guidance, and considerable experience in the subject area.

Professionals beyond the UN System have been leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence in countless ways already, not to replace their work but rather to streamline it, expedite their processes, and modernize. While, naturally, we must be mindful of organizational recommendations and risks, we must recognize that these tools can make a fundamental difference in so many areas of our work, from admin to instructional design and beyond. They can save us a lot of time, costs and effort, allowing us to utilize our expertise in more efficient, productive, and innovative ways.

If you want to learn more about the use of AI, which tool is best used for each different stage and task, how to word your prompts and phrase your requests, and much more, enroll in our upcoming course!