Unlocking Machine Magic for eLearning Development

Wow, what a fun project this turned out to be! To complete the final requirements for my M.S. in Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning, I decided to take a 5-week AI Tools for Learning & Development Professionals course.

While we did a lot of work examining ethics and biases in AI tools, we also had some serious fun in getting hands-on with the AI tools.

We traversed Text-to-Image, Text-to-Video, Text-to-Speech, Chatbots, and more. The ultimate goal was to produce a brief eLearning module on a professional topic of our choice. As I am quite passionate about accessibility, I decided to create a lesson on Writing Accessible LinkedIn posts.

Click here to try out the eLearning module!

Observations:

• There really is no silver bullet that addresses all of the needs. Instead, it's far more efficient to creatively combine the AI tools with some of the tools you're used to. I ended up using iMovie to compose the video with elements from all of the AI tools, and added iStock photos when I couldn't get AI to cooperate!

• Prompt engineering is critical for managing bias. When using Firefly I find that you never know which race or gender will come up in the image. However, when I entered the term "manager" into another model, it tended to generate male images. This bias was well described in the phenomenon of requesting images of nurses. Because of the historical data on the Internet that feeds the LLM, most image are of women - UNLESS you were to use a prompt such as "modern nurse".

• It can be a steep learning curve for mastering some of the tools.

• The apps/platforms have a long way to go from a UX perspective. They are just missing some fundamental features that make it challenging to use the product (ie on Invideo I couldn't sync the script to the images when I made changes).

If you want to see the full academic overview of the project, you can see my portfolio link here.

---

Tools:

In the process, I discovered the most amazing tool, Mindsmith. I had been agonizing over which authoring tool to use as I no longer have a paid subscription to most of the popular ones. Thanks to Reddit, I discovered this ultra-slick, very modern platform and created my module. It was nothing less than amazing!

Here is a quick overview of all the tools used for my final project.:

Tool Used	Purpose
Gemini	Research on creative ways to make LI posts more accessible Possible interactive activities  Storyboard (although I didn’t end up using it, more details under the Mindsmith section) Samples of terrible LI posts for accessible content
Invideo	Initial creation of a video on accessible LI posts. Served as the basis for the script for the final video.
Firefly and Dall-E	Images for the video
HeyGen	Talking head for the final video
eLeven Labs	Second narrator’s voice for the video
Veed.io	Closed captioning
Mindsmith (MY FAVORITE!)	eLearning Module - it has the following built-in: Generates a comprehensive module based on an outline you provide, including images and activities Narration for every slide AI-generated images with alt text (or the use of stock photos, photos from the web, giphy, etc.)