An AI course builder can make you more efficient, but only if you know how to use it. Learn how to avoid five common pitfalls of creating courses with AI.
An AI-powered course builder is designed to make your life easier, but there are also a few potential problem areas to look out for while evaluating your options. Below are the five most common pitfalls that instructors and course developers face when using an online course builder. Learn how to identify (and avoid) these red flags so you can more successfully — and efficiently — build great online courses.
1. A Lack of Assessments
Providing students with lessons and resources is the core purpose of an eLearning platform, but it's just as important to confirm that they're actually absorbing that information. Many instructors and course developers who use AI to build an online course must then manually generate their own quizzes, exams, and other types of assessments to evaluate student learning. Creating effective assessments is time-consuming — and so is grading them.
Fortunately, the best AI course builders give you the option to auto-generate and auto-grade assessments within the learning platform. This makes it easy to quickly assess student learning within any subject, from English to computer coding, and tie results directly to your learning objectives and standards for the course. You’ll save untold hours and leverage the full potential of AI-powered course creation by immediately and accurately scoring student assignments, so they get feedback more quickly while you focus on other tasks.
2. Cookie Cutter Content
AI chatbots scour publicly available resources to put together responses. AI-generated courses can be built from broad, general, and publicly available information. However, such courses can be vague, and cookie-cutter, and may lack the nuances required within your curriculum. If someone can do a Google search and find the same notes and analysis that you share in your course, there's very little incentive for them to sign up and participate in your course.
Using internal content to fuel the AI is an excellent way to overcome this obstacle, but chatbots like ChatGPT don't have that capability on their own. For that reason, one of the most important traits of an AI course creator is that it allows you to upload your internal documents and use them to train the AI. Hone your AI model on your own in-house content to generate truly custom course materials and more personalized, specific content that's distinctly your own.
3. Data Privacy Concerns
For AI to effectively generate content for your course, it first has to access and learn from relevant data. In some cases, that might include sensitive information about your students or your institution. When you use a public AI model, there's also a significant risk of unauthorized parties accessing that data and using it for illegal or inappropriate purposes.
A private AI model, on the other hand, has a higher level of security and poses less of a risk. As the name suggests, private AI isn't available to the public, making it easier to maintain control over your data and minimizing the threat of breaches. Make sure your AI course generation platform is able to provide the reliable security of a private AI model.
4. Personality-Free Pages
Your course should clearly reflect the messaging and style of your organization, carrying your brand's identity along every page. Many AI-generated courses are constructed by merely copying and pasting chatbot responses into documents (which is time-consuming). Other fully functional AI-powered eLearning platforms lack the ability to customize the branding, colors, and logos to match your institution or company, leaving the results bland and looking like they could belong to anyone.
Custom-branded course creation software allows you to incorporate all your preferred aesthetic elements into your course. Customize the logo, fonts, and banners to align with your brand, giving your students a consistent representation of your organization and style.
5. Disconnects with Your LMS
Many schools and businesses exclusively offer their online courses through a learning management system (LMS), such as Moodle or Canvas. Their adoption is especially impressive in higher education, with experts estimating that 99% of colleges and universities and 85% of faculty use an LMS to share course content.
If you use a course creator without integration capabilities, you'll have to manually transfer all the information between the systems, wasting time and resources in the process. Look for an AI course builder that has built-in integration capabilities so you can choose to host your course within the platform or connect it to your LMS.
If you're just beginning to learn how to create a course with AI, it can be difficult to know exactly what not to do. Using IllumiDesk's end-to-end course creation solution is an easy way to steer clear of these pitfalls. For a secure, customizable, and fast course creation process, get started with IllumiDesk for free.
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