Leveraging AI to Create or Adapt OER
Two challenges that OER development, adaptation, and maintenance/updating present are the time and resources these processes take. To mitigate these challenges, AI’s ability to support the creation and updating of new works can be applied to OER – with the caveat that licensing may have particular complications and considerations. See Lesson 6 for more information on navigating that.
Ways to use generative AI to create and adapt OER include:
- Grammar and style checking
- Accessibility improvement (e.g., alt text generation and language simplification)
- Content organization (e.g., automated outlining and topic clustering)
- Conversion to other languages and formats (e.g., translation and creation of audio)
- Data analysis and visualization (e.g., statistical analysis and chart generation)
OpenStax offers MathGPT integration with their textbooks to provide AI-based tutoring, and they recently completed a pilot to test an AI-powered Economics Chatbot, Staxly. OpenStax is evaluating Staxly’s potential for further development and expansion.
Additional potential use cases are included below, along with some examples and AI platform recommendations.
Update Existing OER Content
Adam Croom, Assistant Professor at Gaylord College and Director of the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma, describes his process for using AI to update an OER for his Introduction to Advertising course in Updating an OER Textbook via AI and ChatGPT.
Prompt example: Rewrite this chapter to make it more up-to-date with the changes to the [advertising] industry that have taken place between [dates]. Every time that you rewrite a section, include some notes on what changes you made.
Create “Generative Textbooks”
In his blog opencontent.org, David Wiley of Lumen Learning has described what he calls “generative textbooks,” essentially a list of prompts for students to use with a chatbot to learn about a specific topic and ask the bot to ask them formative questions about the material after they read about it.
In addition, customized chatbots offer a different way to do this. Instead of providing students with prompts, you can provide a chatbot with customized knowledge and instructions to allow for more oversight into what students may get. This is something OER textbook authors have been experimenting with as the companies Poe.com and OpenAI rolled out functionality that supports it in Fall 2023. With these technologies, you can upload an OER textbook as context for a chatbot so that it draws on that text.
However, a concern is that the tutor bot may get something wrong or misrepresent the textbook. It may also fail to quote from the textbook appropriately when using the exact words from the text. Still, these technologies likely are being improved as you read this!
Create Summaries of Content
You can use tools like ChatGPT to condense information and create concise beginning or end of chapter/section summaries, or to expand on topics, providing additional context and depth.
Prompt example: Provide a one-page summary of this chapter, including a one-paragraph overview with the most important information, followed by bullet points highlighting key ideas and major takeaways. Here is some additional context to help in the creation of the summary:
- Context of the reading: A chapter defining the “Climate Fiction Film.”
- Audience of the summary: Students studying climate change and film.
- The summary should be formatted as follows:
- A title of the summary
- One-paragraph summary
- Bullet points for key ideas and major takeaways
Develop Ancillary and Supplemental Course Materials
Use AI tools to draft ancillary materials for your OER textbook, such as quiz banks, discussion board prompts, presentation slides, images, and videos.
Platform suggestions:
- SlidesGPT lets users input text to develop PowerPoint and Google Slides presentations. The free version supports unlimited presentations to share and access to templates, but in order to be able to download PowerPoint, Google Slides, and PDF version, a pay-per-download or enterprise subscription are required.
- Synthesia is a free AI video generator in which instructors and students can select a template, choose or create an avatar, and input a script in 120 different languages to create a video presentation.
Create Textbook and Course Images
Example: For this lesson, we used Microsoft’s Copilot Image Creator to generate an image for it, inputting the prompt: “New ways to create sustainable open educational resources in higher education and online education in simple paper art style.” Here is the output:
You can also see other images in this unit created using an AI image generator. (However, some do better than others at generating accurate text within the image should you prompt it to include text.)
The ideas above represent possible experiments that could disappoint or even fail in their outcomes. How helpful AI will be and how accurate or reliable its outputs will be for each task are open questions. Therefore, consider asking the following when taking the approaches:
- Will it summarize accurately?
- Will this introduce errors?
- Will the time needed to verify the information outweigh the time saved?
- Is the data on which the AI has been programmed itself biased?
It is important to model this questioning spirit for students as well as colleagues.
Helpful Resources
The AI in OER Hub on OER Commons is an initiative of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management (ISKME) to help educators and administrators understand AI and its applications in Open Education.
Getting Started: OER Publishing at BCcampus has added a chapter on GenAI that includes a set of guidelines and recommendations for creating and adapting OER with AI.