Embracing ChatGPT for Online Course Conversions

Overview

In the realm of rapidly evolving education, the need to convert in-class content into functional online courses has become increasingly urgent. Time constraints and the pressure to deliver high-quality learning experiences can make this task seem insurmountable. However, by incorporating ChatGPT into the process, we can overcome these challenges and expedite the conversion while maintaining instructional integrity.

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The Power of ChatGPT in Course Conversion

ChatGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating textual outputs that closely resemble human-written text. It responds to prompts or inputs given by users in a coherent and contextually appropriate manner. ChatGPT's versatile nature allows for a broad array of applications across different aspects of education. By leveraging ChatGPT's expertise and collaboration, educators can unlock a range of benefits.

1.    Rapid Knowledge Acquisition: With ChatGPT, educators have access to a vast knowledge base, allowing them to tap into a wealth of information and strategies specific to online course conversion. ChatGPT's ability to understand and provide detailed responses empowers educators to quickly gather insights, tips, and best practices.

2.    Personalized Guidance and Support: ChatGPT's interactive nature enables educators to engage in meaningful conversations, receiving personalized guidance tailored to their unique circumstances. It serves as a virtual companion, assisting at each step of the conversion process and offering innovative solutions to challenges that arise along the way.

3.    Time Optimization: Efficiency is crucial when converting courses within tight timeframes. ChatGPT streamlines the process by offering prompt responses and valuable recommendations. By working collaboratively with ChatGPT, educators can make informed decisions swiftly, saving significant time that can be allocated to other essential aspects of the conversion.

4.    Expert Insights and Recommendations: ChatGPT's extensive training on a wide array of educational topics equips it with the ability to provide expert insights and recommendations. By engaging in dialogue with ChatGPT, educators gain access to valuable perspectives, ideas, and strategies that might not have been considered otherwise. This ensures that the converted online course meets high-quality standards.

5.    Seamless Collaboration: Collaborating with ChatGPT fosters a symbiotic relationship between educators and artificial intelligence. Together, they can tackle the complexities of course conversion, combining human expertise with AI capabilities. This collaboration helps bridge gaps in knowledge and expertise, resulting in a more comprehensive and effective online course.

Pro’s and Con’s of ChatGPT in Higher Education

As we delve into the realm of course conversion and online learning, it is important to examine the potential advantages and drawbacks of utilizing generative language models like ChatGPT. While ChatGPT offers valuable benefits to educators, we must also acknowledge the concerns surrounding student cheating. The following lists include some of the pros and cons of ChatGPT in the context of online education.

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Pros

1. Expedited Course Conversion: ChatGPT can be a game-changer, facilitating the rapid conversion of in-class content into functional online courses. Its insights, recommendations, and strategies empower educators to save valuable time and effort during this critical process.
   
   
2. Personalized Guidance: Engaging in interactive conversations with ChatGPT allows for a personalized touch, providing educators with customized support and guidance tailored to their unique needs and challenges.
   
   
3. Inspiring Creativity: ChatGPT's ability to generate innovative ideas and fresh perspectives can ignite educators' creativity, helping them craft engaging and interactive online learning experiences for their students.
   
   
4. Streamlined Resource Management: ChatGPT's vast knowledge base is an invaluable resource for educators, by facilitating the efficient gathering of relevant references, materials, and resources required for their online courses.
   
   
5. Collaboration and Expertise: As a virtual companion, ChatGPT enables educators to collaborate seamlessly and tap into its vast database of knowledge and insights, benefiting from expert perspectives and enhancing their teaching practice.

Cons

1. Cheating Risks: The potential misuse of ChatGPT by students seeking to cheat remains an area of concern. To avoid these concerns, educators can implement robust assessment strategies and proctoring systems that effective deter, detect, and prevent cheating .
   
   
2. Contextual Limitations: While ChatGPT provides responses based on patterns and data, it may lack deep contextual understanding. This can result in occasional inaccuracies or incomplete information, increasingly referred to as 'hallucinations.' Educators must exercise critical thinking when evaluating the output and responses they generate from it.
   
   
3. Human Interaction Importance: It is crucial to strike a balance between leveraging ChatGPT and preserving the benefits of human interaction. While ChatGPT offers guidance and support, nothing can replace real-time feedback, empathy, and the nuanced understanding that comes from human interaction.
   
   
4. Privacy and Data Security: Educators must prioritize student privacy and data security when utilizing ChatGPT. Adhering to relevant data protection guidelines and ensuring secure usage of the tool is paramount.

Mitigating Cheating Risks

To address the risk of cheating through ChatGPT, educators can adopt the following strategies:

1. Clear Academic Integrity Policies: Establish and communicate transparent guidelines regarding academic integrity, explicitly addressing the misuse of AI tools like ChatGPT.
   
   
2. Diversified Assessment Methods: Employ a variety of assessment approaches, such as real-time assessments, discussions, group projects, and presentations, which are less susceptible to cheating through AI tools.
   
   Bonus Tip: Consider developing assignments that explicitly require the ethical use of ChatGPT to generate outlines or first drafts with students acting as prompt generators and expert curators of the generated content.
   
   
3. Ethical AI Education: Educate students about the ethical use of AI tools, including ChatGPT, its limitations, and the consequences of academic dishonesty. Nurturing a culture of integrity and responsible technology use is essential.
   
   
4. Proctoring and Monitoring: If needed, consider implementing robust proctoring tools and plagiarism detectors as an additional filter.
   

While ChatGPT offers significant benefits for educators in terms of efficiency, guidance, and resource management during course conversion, it is crucial to address potential challenges - particularly the risk of cheating. Implementing appropriate assessment strategies, promoting academic integrity, and ensuring responsible usage of AI tools like ChatGPT should allow educators to harness its potential while upholding the highest standards of education.

Converting In-Class Content into a Functional Online Courses with the Help of ChatGPT

In today's rapidly changing landscape, time constraints often make it challenging to transition face-to-face courses into an online format. However, we can leverage ChatGPT's capabilities at each step to expedite the process and ensure a successful conversion. The following list provides examples for each of the 7 steps for quickly converting in-class content to functional online courses provided in my previous blog post from 2020.

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1.    Collect existing course materials: Utilize ChatGPT to organize and streamline your existing materials. Discuss with ChatGPT to identify key resources such as syllabi, course schedules, assignment lists, and weekly announcements. Leverage its natural language processing abilities to quickly analyze and categorize these materials.

2.    Identify a suitable structure: Engage ChatGPT to determine the most appropriate structure for your course. Discuss options such as organizing content by weekly modules or theme-based units, based on your syllabus or course schedule. ChatGPT can provide insights and suggestions to align the structure with effective online learning principles.

3.    Recreate the structure in your LMS: Leverage ChatGPT's knowledge of Learning Management Systems (LMS) to guide you in recreating the chosen structure within your LMS platform. Discuss with ChatGPT the specific features and terminology used in your LMS, such as modules or units, and seek its assistance in configuring the course accordingly.

4.    Add relevant materials to each module/unit: Utilize ChatGPT's expertise to efficiently upload necessary materials to each module or unit in your LMS. Seek its advice on the best ways to present readings, files, and additional content. If any content cannot be uploaded, ChatGPT can suggest alternatives like creating informative pages or interactive elements.

5.    Create grade items and feedback mechanisms: Engage ChatGPT to guide you in setting up grade items and feedback mechanisms in your LMS. Discuss each assignment or activity and seek recommendations on how to structure the grading criteria. Collaborate with ChatGPT to ensure accurate linking of grade items to respective assignments and provide students with meaningful feedback.

6.    Review and finalize the grade-book: Leverage ChatGPT's assistance in reviewing and finalizing the grade-book. Collaborate with ChatGPT to ensure all graded elements are correctly linked and that the total points align with the course requirements. Seek its guidance on additional grade items like participation or extra credit, tailoring them to your specific needs.

7.    Perform last-minute checks and optimizations: Utilize ChatGPT's knowledge base to conduct essential last-minute checks. Seek its advice on verifying access permissions, improving course navigation, confirming copyright compliance, and setting accurate due dates. ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and reminders to ensure a smooth user experience for students.

By integrating ChatGPT's capabilities at each step of converting in-class content into an online course, educators can expedite the process without compromising the quality of the learning experience. Leveraging ChatGPT's knowledge and guidance empowers educators to adapt quickly to evolving educational needs and create effective online courses in even the most challenging timeframes. Remember to leverage the resources provided by your LMS and familiarize yourself with ChatGPT's capabilities to make the most of this powerful tool.

Getting Started with ChatGPT

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Step-by-Step Instructions for Using ChatGPT

1.    First, you'll need to access a platform that uses ChatGPT. This could be the OpenAI website or a dedicated app on your mobile device - https://openai.com/

2.    Use the link in the top, right-hand corner of the home page to sign up for a free account with OpenAI.

3.    Select “ChatGPT” from the available OpenAI tools to launch it.

4.    When composing your prompt, think about what you want ChatGPT to do. The model will generate a response based on what you input, so be as clear and specific as you can. If you want to ask a question, write an email, generate a story, etc., write your prompt accordingly. It is also useful to compose prompts using the following formula:

      "Act as a [insert role]. Generate [insert request] in the form of [insert output format]."

5.    Type your prompt into the input field. Remember, the more specific and detailed you are with your prompt, the better ChatGPT will be able to generate a useful response.

6.    Press enter or click on the "Submit" button to send your prompt.

7.    ChatGPT will generate a response based on your prompt. Read through the response to see if it meets your needs. Remember, as an AI, ChatGPT doesn't actually understand text, it's simply predicting what comes next based on patterns in the data it was trained on.

8.    If the response isn't quite what you wanted, don't worry. You can refine it by asking the model to elaborate, or guiding the model in a different direction. It may take a few tries to get the hang of how to prompt the model effectively.

9.    Once you're satisfied with ChatGPT's response, you can use it as you intended. Whether that's sending the email it helped you draft, using the code it helped you write, or studying the information it provided, the output is yours to use.

Remember, ChatGPT is a tool and it's here to assist you. Don't be discouraged if you don't get the desired output initially, learning to effectively communicate with AI models is a skill that takes a little practice to develop.

Leveraging ChatGPT for Each Step of a Course Conversion

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

1. Collect existing course materials: First, you will need to collect all existing course materials including; the course description, learning objectives/outcomes, course syllabus, course schedule, any existing assignment instructions, any grading rubrics, etc. Then, use the following prompt to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities. 
   

• Prompt A: Act as an education consultant. Generate recommendations for effectively structuring and organizing my course materials for online delivery in the form of actionable insights on arranging content into modules, units, or other logical frameworks. My course materials include: [insert course syllabus or similar].
  

2. Identify a suitable structure: Engage ChatGPT to determine the most appropriate structure for your course.
   

• Prompt A: Act as an instructional design consultant. Generate a course structure recommendation in the form of actionable insights and suggestions for organizing my online course. Provide different options, such as organizing content by weekly modules or theme-based units, that specifically align with my syllabus or course schedule. My syllabus or course schedule: [insert syllabus or  course schedule]
  

3. Recreate the structure in your LMS: Leverage ChatGPT's knowledge of Learning Management Systems (LMS) to guide you in recreating the chosen structure within your LMS platform.
   

• Prompt A: Act as an LMS integration specialist. Summarize the specific features and terminology used in [insert name of LMS] such as modules or units. Provide step-by-step instructions for configuring the course accordingly. Provide insights and recommendations to ensure a seamless setup of my course structure within the LMS platform, maximizing its functionality for effective online course delivery.
  

• Prompt B: Act as an LMS integration specialist. Generate instructions in the form of step-by-step guidance for leveraging [insert name of LMS] to recreate my current course structure within the LMS. Current course structure: [insert your modified course syllabus or schedule from step 2].
  

4. Add relevant materials to each module/unit: Utilize ChatGPT's expertise to efficiently upload necessary materials to each module or unit in your LMS.
   

• Prompt A: Act as an LMS content management specialist. Generate instructions in the form of step-by-step guidance to efficiently upload necessary materials to each module or unit in [insert name of LMS]. 
  

• Prompt B: Act as an expert online learning designer. Provide advice on the best ways to present readings, files, and additional content. Provide suggestions for alternatives for any content that cannot be uploaded such as creating informative pages or interactive elements. Your goal is to provide practical recommendations and detailed instructions on how to optimize the presentation of materials within [insert name of LMS] for a seamless learning experience.
  

5. Create grade items and feedback mechanisms: Engage ChatGPT to guide you in setting up grade items and feedback mechanisms in your LMS.
   

• Prompt A: Act as a grading and feedback consultant. Generate instructions in the form of step-by-step guidance for setting up grade items and feedback mechanisms in [insert name of LMS]. 
  

• Prompt B: Act as an online learning specialist. Provide recommendations on how to structure the grading criteria for this assignment: [insert assignment description and instructions].
  

• Prompt C: Act as an educational consultant. Provide practical advice and actionable insights on optimizing the grading and feedback process to enhance student learning and assessment outcomes when teaching in [insert name of LMS].
  

6. Review and finalize the grade-book: Leverage ChatGPT's assistance in reviewing and finalizing the grade-book. Collaborate with ChatGPT to ensure all graded elements are correctly linked and that the total points align with the course requirements. Seek its guidance on additional grade items like participation or extra credit, tailoring them to your specific needs.    
   

• Prompt A: Act as an instructional design consultant. Provide step-by-step guidance for reviewing and finalizing my grade book in [insert name of LMS]. My grade book: [insert list of assignments and associated points].
  

• Prompt B: Act as an online learning specialist. Provide guidance on incorporating additional grade items like participation or extra credit, and tailoring them to [insert your specific needs, i.e. include a weighting system where X is worth 50% of the total grade]. 
  

• Prompt C: Act as a [insert name of LMS] specialist. Generate recommendations on optimizing the grade book structure and ensuring accuracy in grading and assessment. 

7. Perform last-minute checks and optimizations:Utilize ChatGPT's knowledge base to seek its advice on verifying access permissions, improving course navigation, confirming copyright compliance, and setting accurate due dates. ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and reminders to ensure a smooth user experience for students.
   

• Prompt A: Act as an instructional design consultant. Generate recommendations in the form of valuable insights and reminders to assist with verifying access permissions, improving course navigation, confirming copyright compliance, and setting accurate due dates for an online course delivered in [insert name of LMS].
  

• Prompt B: Act as an instructional design consultant. Analyze my online course at [insert URL, be sure you have published the content so that it is publicly visible to anyone with the direct URL] and provide advice for optimizing the user experience for students. Include practical guidance and actionable suggestions on ensuring a seamless and effective online learning environment for this course.
  
  Note - The above prompt will only work effectively if using ChatGPT-4 with web-browser plugins. Previous prompts will work with the free version of ChatGPT-3.5.

Let's Connect!

I hope you found this blog-post helpful. This is an ever-evolving topic in education, and I expect that there will be important updates to these ideas as the coming weeks and months unfold. I invite you to check out my portfolio and contact me. Just click on this link: https://hldtobin.wixsite.com/heatherldtobin. Feel free to explore my portfolio of work to get a sense of my skills and experiences. I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts or answer any questions you may have. Looking forward to nerding out and sharing our passions!

How To Quickly Convert In-Class Content into a Functional Online Course in 7 Steps

I've been helping educators to create effective online learning experiences for the past 15+ years. Most of those conversations have allowed for us to take a relatively large chunk of time to properly prepare and curate an effective online course. The luxury of time has never been easy to come by in education, but even in the most pressured situations there are usually at least a couple of weeks if not months available for putting things together. With recent calls for preventative social distancing in an attempt to flatten the curve of infection for COVID-19 in the U.S., more and more schools are asking educators to convert the courses they've been teaching face-to-face to an online format. Sometimes teachers are given weeks, and sometimes they only have a few days to complete a level of work that most full time professionals need months to do well.

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In these types of situations I fully agree with writers like Rebecca Barret-Fox who recently published a blog with several helpful tips for taking a realistic and reasonable approach to accomplishing this daunting task quickly. Most of the other checklists and best practices available focus on strategies that take time to implement effectively. In my experience, high expectations almost always undermine real progress when teaching with new technologies. It just isn't reasonable to attempt to create an amazingly dynamic and interactive online course this quickly. I hope that the following 7 steps will be a helpful starting point for those of you with only a few days.

1. Collect all of the materials that you already have that serve as an outline for your course. This includes things like syllabi, course schedules, and even assignment lists. If you have any documented weekly announcements or overviews be sure to have them ready as well.


2. Identify a structure that your course can be arranged into. For example, if your course schedule is listed out by week, consider structuring all of your course content around weekly modules. Similarly, if your course syllabus arranges information and assignments around major themes or topics, consider structuring your course content around topical or theme-based units.


3. Recreate the chosen structure within the Learning Management System (LMS) that your educational entity uses (i.e. Schoology, Canvas, Desire2Learn, BlackBoard, Moodle, etc.). To do this, you'll need to know whether the LMS uses 'modules' or 'units' as the 'buckets' where course materials, assignments, and activities can be presented together as one package rather than spread out across all of the various tools. LMS tools include things like, individual pages, assignments, discussions, and files. Units/Modules provide an option for packaging all related information together so students can access them all at once.
   
   
4. Once a module or unit structure is in place, you'll need to add the relevant materials to each of them. This means you'll need to upload all readings or files that students need access to, create pages for any content that can't be uploaded, and create any assignments/discussions that students will be responsible for completing.


5. Use the grade-book tool in your LMS to create a grade item for each assignment or activity that students will receive a grade for. Be sure to attach each grade item to the appropriate assignment as you create it. For example, if students will be graded for uploading an essay during the first module, you'll need to create a grade item titled after that assignment (i.e. "Module 1 Essay" that is also manually linked to that assignment. Once students upload the assignment, you'll then be able to use the grade-book item to provide them with feedback.


6. Review and finalize the grade-book for your course to ensure that all graded elements are linked to the correct grade items, and that all grade points add up to the total possible points for the course. It is also possible to create a grade item that is not attached to a specific assignment. For example, you may want to create grade items for "extra credit" or for "participation" that you plan to manually enter points into for each student.


7. Last minute checks for access, build, copyright, and due dates are also vital (check your ABCD's).
   
   • Access: be sure that all content is published and visible to students (in addition to publishing individual modules and elements created within the course, some LMS's also require you to publish the full course manually before students will be able to see anything).
   
   
   • Build/Navigation: switch to the 'student' view at least once and run through the course to make sure that things are as easy to find as possible. You'll want to be sure that a student logging into the course for the first time will be able to figure out where to find important information, and how to move through the course successfully.
   
   
   • Copyright: double check that any videos, photographs, or resources that you did not create include appropriate citations and links. Fair Use is often leaned on when creating online educational experiences, but should not be relied on by itself. We are still responsible for making a reasonable effort to credit original sources.
   
   
   • Due Dates: triple check that all of the assignments you've created also have due dates set, and that those due dates are accurate. The LMS will also often require that you set a due date time (i.e. Sunday, 3/15 by 11:59pm) and will often default to a specific time zone. If your students are in varying time-zones it will be important to clarify that for them early on.

TIP: Almost every LMS has a dedicated help section, hotline, chat-room, and/or a set of robust user guides that can be accessed online for up-to-date instructions when completing the steps above. Be sure to familiarize yourself with those resources as they will probably be extremely useful, especially if this is your first time using the LMS. 


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