Embark on an exciting journey into the realm of AI-enhanced teaching with this comprehensive 60-minute webinar. Designed for real-world application, this session introduced practical ways to incorporate AI into your classroom using Harmonize — including our first live demo of the student rubric coach!
But in case you didn’t join the webinar or have 60 free minutes to watch on-demand, we’ve distilled the key takeaways in this post. Prepare to teach more effectively and add an element of fun to your educational methods.
Our Philosophy around Activity Building & AI in your Classroom
We start with this: What is it that our students need to learn from this assignment and what is their level?
From there, we coached ChatGPT on Bloom’s Taxonomy and learning outcomes.
Our philosophy around all this AI stuff? You’re already the subject matter expert and know the topic you want students to discuss; we just want you to let AI complement your skills by assisting in the creation of high-quality, scientifically informed teaching materials. These tools will not only make your classroom more engaging and grading more efficient, but they’ll also help you identify and support students at risk of falling behind.
We’re focused on using AI for good — that is, to help you instruct more effectively, taking the mundane off the instructor’s plate.
The bottom line: we use AI in Harmonize to automate the inconsequential so you can focus on the consequential.
A Guide to Integrating AI into Your Classroom with Harmonize
AI for Better Course Discussions: If you know what you want to teach — the topic or subject matter — then you can use the ChatGPT engine in Harmonize to build an effective and engaging discussion prompt. But we coached GPT in Harmonize on Bloom’s Taxonomy and more than 60 different approaches to online discussions. You add the complexity level of your students and the topic, and you’ll get a solid starting point and variation in approaches on every run.
The benefits of using AI in Harmonize for course discussions are that it results in more engaging prompts, stronger student participation, and quicker prompts at scale right within your digital classroom. One of the best parts is that it takes less than a minute to get a strong foundation for a course activity, and you can keep refining and rerunning the prompt until you get what is going to work for your students and course.
What does it look like for the student? Once you post your prompt to the students, it will show like a normally generated discussion. But you also have the option to cite AI as your instructional assistant for the prompt — your call! We recommend including a video with the discussion assignment. That kind of instructor presence goes a long way to enticing student participation.
AI for Easier Assessment with Rubrics: According to the American Faculty Association, instructors spend up to 4 hours of out-of-class time preparing and assessing students for each hour of a class, which holds just as true for online, hybrid, or blended learning. Data showed that teaching an online course requires anywhere from 3 to 7 or more hours per week — of course, that varies by discipline, experience level, and whether or not you’ve taught this course before.
So to help alleviate some of that prep time, we’re using AI in Harmonize to generate the rubric you need based on your assignment activity and have it available for grading right within your LMS, without having to do any copying or pasting! When you use ChatGPT in Harmonize to develop rubrics and ease that assessment process, there’s more time to focus on feedback for continuous student improvement.
In addition to saving time and assigning grades in a more systematic way, you’ll:
- Set clearer expectations for how students should engage in the course and with your course material
- Ensure students stay laser focused on building the right skills and competencies required of your course, providing clear examples by level in the rubric
- Eliminate any of manual tasks you’ve associated with rubrics in the past
- Reduce bias in grading
What does that look like? Once you have your activity instructions, we pull out the top four focus areas for what student success looks like on this assignment.
You can then use those focus areas as is or add to or edit them, and then choose to surface those focus areas to students before they begin the assignment. Research shows that providing students with success criteria before they perform an assignment significantly improves their performance. Plus, the use of success criteria during formative assessment has been linked to increased academic confidence, a stronger sense of belonging, and a better mastery of skills. Now, what if you take that a step further and turn those focus areas into a gradable rubric.
When you generate a full rubric from those focus areas, you not only present students with a complete view of your intentions behind this assignment, you also provide a path to growth and success on this assignment. A rubric for assessment with full descriptions for each level of each criteria along with the focus is not presented front and center for each student, setting them up for success and setting instructors up for easier assessment. It connects directly to your grade book.
COMING SOON! Coaching Students with your Rubric: After an assignment is complete, most students don’t think about how they’ve done. They don’t think about if they’ve directly and clearly addressed the criteria on the assignment rubric. Now that you have your rubric for the discussion, you can offer students a quick feedback loop before their assignment gets to you for evaluation. While the Rubric Coach doesn’t tell them what to fix, but it does guide students to what part of the rubric they should focus on more for improvement. It’s a way to encourage students to become more self-reflective before submitting work, in real time, so they can continue improving along their learning journey.
In short, it’s helping students read and understand the rubric better. It’s about self assessing and resubmitting, and then self assessing and resubmitting so that by the time it gets to the instructor, you can focus on the more constructive or summative feedback for student improvement.
AI to Monitor Participation: In an online class, it’s easy to focus on only the students who are engaged, present and participating. But it’s important to find those students who aren’t engaging. We leaned on AI to help you identify those students who may need more attention — before it’s too late. We figure out a peer norm for your course and then identify those students falling below the norm.
We help you reach out to those students as well as encourage interactivity among students. Our goal is to enable you, as the instructor, to build stronger class connection, community, and engagement for the group and each individual student.
Want to learn more? If you’re interested in seeing how AI in Harmonize can help you improve student outcomes, let’s talk.
