Inspire Blog Author: Philip Chambers

I got OpenAI’s ChatGPT to design an English language course

Note: This was conducted using the Jan 9 Pre Research Preview version of ChatGPT. Introduction ChatGPT has been featured everywhere recently, with some educators being particularly worried because of its ability to craft essays, provide answers to quiz questions, and bypass plagiarism detection software. Teachers are trying to find ways to detect AI generated content, but are we being too hasty to associate AI in education with academic misconduct? Could the tool being used to cheat on courses actually help build them? I put this to the test by asking ChatGPT some questions. Note: The purpose of this was to see how much of the course development process could be generated by the chatbot. How to begin? Let’s start at … I got OpenAI’s ChatGPT to design an English language course
by · April 12, 2023

Writing Good Documentation for Online Courses or: How I became a Documentarian

In my last post, I wrote about how designing an ‘open course‘ empowers others to make desired edits more easily. One major component of an open course is providing adequate and accurate documentation for your intended audience. If you were handed a course to teach or redesign, what aspects about the course would you like to know? Probably as much as possible, which would require a strong set of documentation detailing design processes and decisions, learning outcomes, tutorials for using novel course elements, and so on. If you care about having a solid set of documentation for your courses, then you may be a ‘Documentarian‘. In this post, I look into some components of good documentation design from the software … Writing Good Documentation for Online Courses or: How I became a Documentarian
by · September 20, 2022

Designing the open course: Why Instructional Designers should follow a “right to repair” plan

Intro The concept of the ‘right to repair’ has been on my mind recently, both as a user of tech products and as a designer of online courses. Electronics are notorious these days for their enigmatic design. The user is not trusted to make repairs or is restricted in the ways they can interact with device components. This is a choice made by manufacturers to limit access to approved vendors or repair shops. Instructional Designers have a similar choice when building courses. Do we follow a restrictive approach to modifications, or open up courses by anticipating, welcoming, and providing the resources for modifications? Difficult by design I recently experienced the restrictive side myself as I needed to fix an air … Designing the open course: Why Instructional Designers should follow a “right to repair” plan
by · May 23, 2022

Reflections on page elements for accessible courses

Introduction The LMS Canvas by Instructure comes with a decent set of styled elements to start with, but diving into the HTML editor is where you can really modify content, giving it a specific look and feel. Recently I have found that I am going to these customized elements more often to help achieve learning outcomes and provide a different look and feel for accessible course pages. It is not limitless, however, or even as open as regular web development would be. Canvas has an HTML Editor Allowlist for elements, styles and classes (though some absent from this list will work if you give it a go!). Many of these are activated by using in-line class or style, but other attributes … Reflections on page elements for accessible courses
by · March 15, 2021