You’re probably hearing a lot about artificial intelligence at Learning Technologies and other edtech conferences this year. It’s the biggest, buzziest topic of the moment and it’s unavoidably everywhere. But there’s also a solid chance that you’ve also got a bit of AI fatigue too.

It’s as trendy to want to adopt and experiment with AI right now as it is to criticise its use and output. However, the thing about trends is we’re often told about them in a way that appeals to our sense of FOMO — the fear of missing out. The implication is we’re meant to leap excitedly onto the bandwagon, throwing all our energy, resources, and enthusiasm into exploring whatever the next big shiny thing is. But AI is bigger than a trend. It’s also evolving rapidly, and we simply don’t know yet all the ways that it will affect our world.

A lot of the AI buzz is coming from vendors, (and full disclosure, I’m a Senior Director of Product Management at an LMS company) many of whom have worked to figure out ways to quickly adapt and adopt AI functionality into their product offerings and roadmaps. As they should — no one wants to buy a learning platform that actively avoids innovation!

But the L&D vendors aren’t the buyers or end-users. The people “out in the training trenches” are teachers, instructional designers, LMS administrators, trainers, and instructors. If you’re one of these already busy professionals, you may be wondering how you’re meant to truly use this evolving technology while still keeping up with your day-to-day duties.

So, here are four guiding principles to consider around AI adoption.

 

1) Experiment, but start small

If you’re grappling with the question of whether AI is just “noise” or if it’s truly good news, the first thing you can do is experiment. And this doesn’t have to be costly. My own journey with AI started from a personal need — sheer curiosity, exploring what I can ask it to do. I wondered if there were tasks I could delegate to it. A good example is drafting an email. We’re an international company and I work with a lot of people from different cultures all over the world. Could I use AI to polish my grammar and translate internal emails into other languages? (Absolutely! AI is perfect for this).

This personal exploration formed an excellent basis for when we started to look, on a professional level, at how we can translate AI’s possibilities to our customers and users. Which leads me to the next point…

 

2) Iterate, but check everything

I have a cautiously optimistic approach to AI. Exploring with an open mind means rigorously checking everything, from the prompts you’re inputting to the content it’s outputting. Think of AI as an assistant, not a replacement for teachers, instructors, and admins.

 

3) Know your audience, and help AI understand it too

This isn’t limited to AI, of course, but it’s important to understand who could benefit from AI and how. The prompts are taken quite literally and LLMs don’t have the ability to read between the lines or infer meaning. If you want AI to create content for a specific audience, be as specific as you possibly can about that audience when writing your prompts, even if your input sounds like information overload.

A great use case I’ve seen for instructors is where AI can transform the tone of a piece of content. If, for example, you have a PDF of very formal, quite dry content and want to repurpose it for an audience of 16-year-olds, AI can change the tone, making it more informal and more accessible to these end-users.

 

4) Make learning personal, but be mindful of concerns

A more personalised learning experience is better for student engagement and knowledge retention. AI can help tailor learning content to its intended audience. For example, you could ask AI to develop a whole set of multiple-choice assessment questions based on the course content, aimed at different audiences. Or, with AI text-to-image generation, you can create highly specific imagery to complement your eLearning, achieving visual elements that you may not be able to easily get anywhere else.

This said, as AI adoption in education grows, organisations and educational institutions must address concerns regarding misinformation, plagiarism, and bias in AI-generated content. It’s important to know your company’s policies and guidelines, and ask any software vendor how they’re working with AI and data.

 

What AI can co today won’t be as exciting as what it will do tomorrow

There are a lot of uncertainties around AI right now and it’s advancing at such a rapid pace that, at times, it can feel overwhelming. A way around this is to talk to your colleagues and peers about how they’re using it, and to educate yourself on AI best practices. Knowing what to do and what not to do helps to give you direction on how to rely on AI in a way you feel comfortable with. AI is here to stay and it has a lot of different uses, but it’s also unlikely that you’ll find a robot teacher inside an LMS anytime soon!

For now, AI still offers educational professionals many tools that will actually make a difference (whether you’re a corporate, nonprofit, or educational institute). When used well, AI can take task completion from hours to minutes. Sure, you still need to proofread and check it, but AI can make you more productive as an educator, which also happens to be great news for your learners.

 

Laura Martin Prieto 

Senior Director of Product Management at Open LMS