For this assignment you are a teaching trying to get your students to learn with AI. You need to design a short learning exercise that helps students (your colleagues in this class) use AI to learn something you previously struggled to understand.
The topic should come from a class you have taken (or are currently taking). It might be a concept, skill, or type of problem that you never fully understood the first time around.
You need to make sure students know what they are supposed to be learning so they can think about how to use AI for learning instead of just getting an answer.
Instead of simply asking AI to explain the concept, your task is to design a transparent learning process that shows how AI can support real learning and understanding.
Many students—maybe you at some point—already use AI tools to help with assignments (and I don’t mean cheating). But using AI to help with work is not the same as using AI to learn something difficult.
This project asks you to experiment with a different question:
What does an AI-centric assignment look like that helps someone learn to use AI to learn?
Obviously that’s what this class is about, and teaching is often the best way to learn. Designing a learning process obviously helps someone learn from your assgignment, but more importantly it help you learn how to use AI to learn.
Someone else will need to follow your instructions and use AI to learn the same concept. We’ll test this out in class!
You will design a short AI-assisted learning exercise that includes:
Your topic should be something that was genuinely difficult for you (and maybe continues to be).
Examples might include:
The goal is not to choose something easy so that it’s easy to explain. The assignment will actually be harder because it won’t make any sense. The goal is to explore how AI might help with challenging learning situations.
Your assignment should include clear instructions for how AI should be used.
These instructions should explain:
AI can help with things like:
The assignment you create should embrace transparent assignment design. This means explaining clearly to your imagined student:
As the instructor, how can you tell if your students actually learned something? In most cases, that means emphasizing process over product while still including some clear sign that understanding improved. What is it you want to see as evidence of learning?
Your evaluation section might include bullet points like these:
In general, a strong evaluation rubric should ask: can the student now explain, apply, and question the idea better than they could at the beginning?
Finally, separate from the assignment you create for students, include a short (~250 word) reflection discussing what you learned about AI when creating the assignment.
You might consider questions such as:
The goal of this reflection is to think about how AI can augment the process of learning. Use these reflection prompts to inform the reflection prompts you have to include on your assignment. Don’t just copy and paste, though, tailor them to your particular assignment for more useful understnading how your students were using it.
Keep these in mind while you’re composing your assignment, and make sure you have them all when you think you’re done.
The assignment clearly identifies a specific concept or skill that needed improvement. Your students should understand why it’s important to learn the topic.
The exercise provides clear and structured instructions for how AI should be used. Someone else should be able to follow the activity and attempt the same learning process.
Make clear how AI is used to support learning rather than simply produce answers. Students should be asked to demonstrate awareness of both the strengths and limitations of AI tools.
The project shows clear evidence that the concept or skill was better understood by the end of the exercise. Readers should be able to see how the student’s understanding changed.