Want to build an AI tool that will seriously impact your digital learning program? Right now? For a price that you may well have in your professional development budget?

I’m launching a project to prove we can build a tool that will change the economics of learning design and curricular materials in months rather than years. Its total cost will be low enough to be paid for by workshop participation fees.

Join me.

The learning design bottleneck

Many of my friends running digital course design teams tell me they cannot keep up with demand. Whether their teams are large or small, centralized or instructor-led, higher education or corporate learning and development (L&D), the problem is the same; several friends at large shops have told me that their development of new courses and redesigns of old ones have all but ground to a halt. They don’t have time or money to fix the problem.

I’ve been asking, “Suppose we could accelerate your time to develop a course by, say, 20%?” Twenty percent is my rough, low-end guess about the gains. We should be able to get at least that much benefit without venturing into the more complex and riskier aspects of AI development. “Would a 20% efficiency gain be significant?” I ask.

Answer: “It would be huge.”

My friends tend to cite a few benefits:

• Unblocked bottlenecks: A 20% efficiency gain would be enough for them to start building (or rebuilding) courses at a reasonable speed again.
• Lower curricular materials costs: Organizations could replace more licensed courses with ones that they own. No more content license costs. And you can edit it any way you need to.
• Better quality: The tool would free up learning designers to build better courses rather than running just to get more courses finished.
• More flexibility with vendors: Many departments hire custom course design shops. A 20% gain in efficiency would give them more flexibility in deciding when and how to invest their budgets in this kind of consulting.

The learning design bottleneck is a major business problem for many organizations. Relatively modest productivity gains would make a substantial difference for them. Generative AI seems like a good tool for addressing this problem. How hard and expensive would it be to build a tool that, on average, delivers a 20% gain in productivity?

Not very hard, not very expensive

Every LMS vendor, courseware platform provider, curricular materials vendor, and OPM provider is currently working on tools like this. I have talked to a handful of them. They all tell me it’s not hard—depending on your goals. Vendors have two critical constraints. First, the market is highly suspicious of black-box vendor AI and very sensitive to AI products that make mistakes. EdTech companies can’t approach the work as an experiment. Second, they must design their AI features to fit their existing business goals. Every feature competes with other priorities that their clients are asking for.

The project I am launching—AI Learning Design Assistant (ALDA)—is different. First, it’s design/build. The participants will drive the requirements for the software. Second, as I will spell out below, our software development techniques will be relatively simple and easy to understand. In fact, the value of ALDA is as much in learning patterns to build reliable, practical, AI-driven tools as it is in the product itself. And third, the project is safe.

ALDA is intended to produce a first draft for learning designers. No students need to see content that has not been reviewed by a human expert or interact directly with the AI at all. The process by which ALDA produces its draft will be transparent and easy to understand. The output will be editable and importable into the organization’s learning platform of choice.

Here’s how we’ll do it:

• Guided prompt engineering: Your learning designers probably already have interview questions for the basic information they need to design a lesson, module, or course. What are the learning goals? How will you know if students have achieved those goals? What are some common sticking points or misconceptions? Who are your students? You may ask more or less specific and more or less elaborate versions of these questions, but you are getting at the same ideas. ALDA will start by interviewing the user, who is the learning designer or subject-matter expert. The structure of the questions will be roughly the same. While we will build out one set of interview questions for the workshop series, changing the design interview protocol should be relatively straightforward for programmers who are not AI specialists.
• Long-term memory: One of the challenges with using a tool like ChatGPT on its own is that it can’t remember what you talked about from one conversation to the next and it might or might not remember specific facts that it was trained on (or remember them correctly). We will be adding a long-term memory function. It can remember earlier answers in earlier design sessions. It can look up specific documents you give it to make sure it gets facts right. This is an increasingly common infrastructure component in AI projects. We will explore different uses of it when we build ALDA. You’ll leave the workshop with the knowledge and example code of how to use the technique yourself.
• Prompt enrichment: Generative AI often works much better when it has a few really good, rich examples to work from. We will provide ALDA with some high-quality lessons that have been rigorously tested for learning effectiveness over many years. This should increase the quality of ALDA’s first drafts. Again, you may want your learning designs to be different. Since you will have the ALDA source code, you’ll be able to put in whatever examples you want.
• Generative AI export: We may or may not get to building this feature depending on the group’s priorities in the time we have, but the same prompt enrichment technique we’ll use to get better learning output can also be used to translate the content into a format that your learning platform of choice can import directly. Our enrichment examples will be marked up in software code. A programmer without any specific AI knowledge can write a handful of examples translating that code format into the one that your platform needs. You can change it, adjust it, and enrich it if you change platforms or if your platform adds new features.

The consistent response from everyone in EdTech I’ve talked to who is doing this kind of work is that we can achieve ALDA’s performance goals with these techniques. If we were trying to get 80% or 90% accuracy, that would be different. But a 20% efficiency gain with an expert human reviewing the output? That should be very much within reach. The main constraints on the ALDA project are time and money. Those are deliberate. Constraints drive focus.

Let’s build something useful. Now.

The collaboration

Teams that want to participate in the workshop will have to apply. I’m recruiting teams that have immediate needs to build content and are willing to contribute their expertise to making ALDA better. There will be no messing around. Participants will be there to build something. For that reason, I’m quite flexible about who is on your team or how many participate. One person is too few, and eight is probably too many. My main criterion is that the people you bring are important to the ALDA-related project you will be working on.

This is critical because we will be designing ALDA together based on the experience and feedback from you and the other participants. In advance of the first workshop, my colleagues and I will review any learning design protocol documentation you care to share and conduct light interviews. Based on that information, you will have access to the first working iteration of ALDA at the first workshop. For this reason, the workshop series will start in the spring. While ALDA isn’t going to require a flux capacitor to work, it will take some know-how and effort to set up.

The workshop cohort will meet virtually once a month after that. Teams will be expected to have used ALDA and come up with feedback and suggestions. I will maintain a rubric for teams to use based on the goals and priorities for the tool as we develop them together. I will take your input to decide which features will be developed in the next iteration. I want each team to finish the workshop series with the conviction that ALDA can achieve those performance gains for some important subset of their course design needs.

Anyone who has been to one of my Empirical Educator Project (EEP) or Blursday Social events knows that I believe that networking and collaboration are undervalued at most events. At each ALDA workshop, you will have time and opportunities to meet with and work with each other. I’d love to have large universities, small colleges, corporate L&D departments, non-profits, and even groups of students participating. I may accept EdTech vendors if and only if they have more to contribute to the group effort than just money. Ideally, the ALDA project will lead to new collaborations, partnerships, and even friendships.

Teaching AI about teaching and learning

The workshop also helps us learn together about how to teach AI about teaching and learning. AI research is showing us how much better the technology can be when it’s trained on good data. There is so much bad pedagogy on the internet. And the content that is good is not marked up in a way that is friendly to teach AI patterns. What does a good learning objective or competency look like? How do you write hints or assessment feedback that helps students learn but doesn’t give away the answers? How do you create alignment among the components of a learning design?

The examples we will be using to teach the AI have not only been fine-tuned for effectiveness using machine learning over many years; they are also semantically coded to capture some of these nuances. These are details that even many course designers haven’t mastered.

I see a lot of folks rushing to build “robot tutors in the sky 2.0” without a lot of care to make sure the machines see what we see as educators. They put a lot of faith in data science but aren’t capturing the right data because they’re ignoring decades of learning science. The ALDA project will teach us how to teach the machines about pedagogy. We will learn to identify the data structures that will empower the next generation of AI-powered learning apps. And we will do that by becoming better teachers of ALDA using the tools of good teaching: clear goals, good instructions, good examples, and good assessments. Much of it will be in plain English, and the rest will be in a simple software markup language that any computer science undergraduate will know.

Wanna play?

The cost for the workshop series, including all source code and artifacts, is $25,000 for your team. You can find an application form and prospectus here. Applications will be open until the workshop is filled. I already have a few participating teams lined up and a handful more that I am talking to.

You also find a downloadable two-page prospectus and an online participation application form here. To contact me for more information, please fill out this form:

[Update: I’m hearing from a couple of you that your messages to me through the form above are getting caught in the spam filter. Feel free to email me at [email protected] if the form isn’t getting through.]

I hope you’ll join us.