AI in Action at Open LMS: Saving Time and Supporting Your Own Creativity

AI is permeating every industry, and higher education is no exception. This technology has the potential to save busy instructors precious time and make their jobs a little easier, but it must be used appropriately to be effective. Open LMS leverages AI technology to empower educators and institutions. Read on to learn how you can take full advantage of these AI-powered tools.

This blog post is inspired by a webinar. For a deeper dive, you can watch the recording below.

A “Cautiously Optimistic” Approach to AI

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now about AI. It’s advancing at such a rapid pace that it’s overwhelming at times to see how much it’s evolving. But if you can rely on a community of peers and colleagues that are also trying it out and are gaining a lot of time or productivity that helps give you a path on how to rely on AI.

By now we all know that AI has nearly endless potential. Organizations and individuals are using the technology to enhance productivity and performance by creating photos, videos, written work, music, and so much more—all in a matter of moments! Institutions should be leaning into this technology to ensure their teachers and students are equipped to handle AI-powered professional environments.

AI tools can drastically reduce the time and effort required to create course content and assessments, among other things. Spending less time writing assessment questions means more time can be devoted to meaningful engagement with students to support their academic success. While it’s true that indiscriminate overuse of generative AI can lead to quality issues, gaining familiarity with AI is essential to helping users identify its strengths and compensate for its weaknesses. This understanding also helps educators comprehend when AI has been inappropriately used in student submissions.

The Open LMS platform leverages AI tools to support educators and make their jobs easier with a “cautiously optimistic” approach to implementing the technology into its platform. We recognize that finding the best use for AI can be daunting, but surrounding yourself with a community committed to best practices can make things more manageable.

DOWNLOAD THIS RELATED EBOOK | ‘Artificial Intelligence and Learning Management: The Impact of AI On eLearning Programs’

How to Make the Most of Open LMS’s AI Features

Possibly the most important thing to keep in mind regarding AI is that it’s a tool that should never replace human creativity. Think of it as an assistant to help your instructors. The tool cannot replace teachers’ deep subject knowledge and expertise, nor should it. Instead, AI features are meant to make life a little easier for the people creating your courses, content, and assessments.

TinyMCE AI Assistant

Open LMS offers a variety of AI-backed tools and features to assist educators. Some of these tools include exclusive plugins like an AI-assisted editor for TinyMCE, the default rich-text editor for Moodle™-based platforms. With this tool, you have a powerful assistant across the LMS that can:

• Summarize information: Quickly condense complex content into short, digestible summaries
• Create tables: Automatically generate tables from existing text in seconds
• Expand content: Enrich your content by expanding brief text with added detail and context
• Generate bullet points: Organize ideas into clear, concise bullet points
• Grammar review: Ensure your writing is error-free with AI-powered grammar checks
• Change tone: Easily adjust the tone of your writing to suit your audience—from formal to casual
• Adjust style: Modify the writing style to meet your content needs
• Translate text: Translate your content into 13 languages to reach a global audience

Changing the tone of certain content items can improve learner accessibility. Let’s say you have a PDF that’s very structured and formal, and you want the information to be way more informal for 16-year-olds. You can change the tone to make the content far more accessible to your end-users. It’s very flexible and straightforward.

Moodle™ OpenAI Community Plugins

As a Moodle™-based platform, Open LMS users also have access to various community plugins, including OpenAI Chat Block, a fully customizable chatbot that offers your users 24/7 support. You can also integrate a range of text-to-question and text-to-image generators. A text-to-question generator can provide instructors with question sets based on text or other content “fed” to the tool. Instructors can save significant time creating assignments or assessments by asking this AI tool to do the heavy lifting. A text-to-image tool is useful for course designers and teachers who need very specific visuals to enrich their courses. They just type their prompts and the AI tool generates an image. (An OpenAI account is required to take full advantage of these plugins.)

AI Partner Integrations

In addition to its native tools and access to OpenAI plugins, Open LMS partners with leading organizations to offer even more AI integrations:

• TeacherMatic offers over 70 AI-assisted generators that help teachers convert files, plan lessons, and more.
• Copyleaks detects academic dishonesty by checking student submissions for AI-generated content, language conversions, unoriginal machine code, and more.
• Turnitin checks submissions for plagiarism and AI-generated content, and it also offers streamlined grading tools for instructors.

TAKE A DEEP-DIVE INTO THESE AI TOOLS | ‘All About AI in Open LMS: Redefining the Future of Education and Training’

Moving Forward and Staying Safe With AI

AI has a lot of knowledge, but it’s evolving. It’s getting to where it wants to be, but at this point, it’s not necessarily fully reliable. If it doesn’t have the ‘right’ answer, it will create an answer for you. It won’t necessarily double-check facts. It will give you an answer that it thinks you want. At this point, we really need to keep relying on our knowledge, our instructors, and our subject matter experts. They know the truth. They have the answers. They know the history.

Relying on human experts to check AI outputs is one way to ensure the technology is working in your favor and keeping your students (and your organization) safe. It’s also important to be aware of your institution’s specific policies around AI-generated content creation and distribution. Educating yourself on your internal policies can protect you from unintentional noncompliance with your institution’s standards.

Using open-source platforms like Open LMS and tools like OpenAI can also give you more visibility into how an AI model works, such as:

• What the model is doing
• How the AI operates
• What data is it using to generate AI outputs

These tools include guardrails to protect users, and open-source platforms like Open LMS can be customized to meet your institution’s digital safety needs.