ONLINE learning – especially student outcomes – will benefit greatly from artificial intelligence (AI).
OpenLearning.com founder and chief executive officer Adam Brimo said generative AI (GenAI) can be used to solve issues, such as learning design, that have been plaguing online learning platforms.
“Educators and software designers are now trying to ‘morph software’ to create online lesson modules.
“We have these ideas of what we want but the platform doesn’t support it so we are always trying to find a way to work around it,” he said, adding that now with AI, online learning providers are able to better design and customise lessons for different student outcomes.“You can tell ChatGPT 4 that ‘this course is going to be a learning based credit course’ or ‘I want my outcome to be structured on Bloom’s Taxonomy or socio-emotional learning’.
“With AI, we can contextualise and develop content suited to the application in a way we couldn’t before,” Brimo said, adding that it is also now possible to build courses and programmes that deliver much better outcomes.
He said over the past year, OpenLearning.com has built a range of tools specifically focused on how to implement best practices by having AI act as a “virtual learning designer”.Singapore Education Network founder and managing director Michael Klemm said there is a need to have structured training and implementation of digital tools for educators, both in school and in higher learning institutions.
“In universities, the biggest obstacle is that teachers and educators don’t have enough time for professional learning or there’s no incentive to do so.
“Universities need to use the technology and make it easily accessible and really user-friendly,” he said, adding that any initiative taken to use AI is usually the result of an educator’s own efforts.
Brimo and Klemm were among the panellists of the Times Higher Education (THE) Asia Universities Summit 2024 held from April 29 to May 1 at Sunway University.
The duo were part of a three-man panel discussing “innovations in online learning and their impact on transnational education”.
