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 — and all without needing in-depth knowledge of AI intricacies like prompt engineering.
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 AI in your Classroom
You’re already the subject matter expert; 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
The bottom line: we use AI in Harmonize to automate the inconsequential so you can focus on the consequential.
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. 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 benefit of using AI in course discussions includes more engaging prompts, stronger student participation, and quicker prompts at scale. 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!
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 gradebook.
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.
Coming Soon: Rubric Coaching for Students
What’s Rubric Coaching? 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.
It’s like a form of nudging…That reminder text to make your upcoming dental appointment. That email showing your electricity use for the month. Making healthier food options more noticeable in the teacher’s lounge or cafeteria. These are all forms of nudging that are designed to help you remember, reflect more deeply, or urge action — which can be extremely helpful in improving results. The same can apply to student performance…coming soon, how nudge technology in Harmonize in the form of a Rubric Coach for Students will help them continuously iterate on their work for better outcomes.
Want to learn more? If you’re interested in seeing how AI in Harmonize can help you improve student outcomes, let’s talk.
