Sub-Badge 4: Analyze technologies

Challenge: Analyze the characteristics of existing and emerging technologies and their potential use.

Criteria for successful completion of this challenge: Evidence of describing emerging technologies and evaluating the benefits and limitations of the tool’s usage.  Reflection must address: How you determined the use of a piece of technology and described its potential use or non-use. 

Examples: Course discussions on emerging techs (EDCI 577, EDCI 568, EDCI 564), Final EDCI 513 paper if focused on the use of a technology, artifacts showing benefits/limitations of tool usage or selection (design, performance, workplace, educational, other). 

Reflection

The competency/challenge was to analyze the characteristics of existing and emerging technologies and their potential use. I decided to evaluate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to typical tasks that an instructional designer would do in the design phase. Because Purdue uses Microsoft CoPilot, I used that for my AI tool. To perform my analysis, I used materials from a pre-existing learning module that I designed and developed for EDCI 531 in order to evaluate Microsoft CoPilot’s output. I also used Canva’s DALL-E AI integrated tool to test out a few image designs. After prompting CoPilot through three tasks, and Canva’s DALL-E through one task, I wrote an analytical blog post on my Learning Design Blog that takes the reader through the three different prompts (tasks) and provides an evaluation of the usefulness of the AI tool for learning design purposes. This blog post evaluates both the limitations and benefits associated with the three tasks I gave to CoPilot as representative examples of typical tasks an ID might use AI for.

Because AI is not going away anytime soon, and many authoring tools already integrate AI, instructional designers need to understand the benefits and limitations of these tools. They can be useful for research or validating existing design plans, but they complicate matters when the AI user wants to use them to create something from scratch, or when the AI user is hopeful to retain a copyright on designs. Professionally, IDs need to be well-informed on the capabilities of AI and when they should avoid using AI outputs when copyright issues might arise.  This artifact demonstrates the competency because I take readers through three examples of how the AI tool, Microsoft CoPilot, was used, and I explore the benefits and limitations for each of the three tasks. These tasks represent typical actions that an ID might take in the course of daily workflows; therefore, this artifact demonstrates competency in holistically evaluating this emerging technology.

I have been testing out Microsoft CoPilot for writing job application cover letters. In my practice using CoPilot for this purpose, I have uploaded my resume/CV and the job descriptions, and I have asked it to write cover letters emphasizing certain professional experiences from my background. The results have been similar to what I would have written on my own except they are typically bullet-pointed lists, which is not how I normally write a cover letter. What I have done in all cases of using CoPilot for this purpose is that I have heavily edited the output to bend toward my own voice as a writer and to fill in certain gaps that it did not include. This was also my experience looking at the output from CoPilot for my three Tasks, as documented in my blog post artifact. While CoPilot might give you a good starting point, you must put in a lot of work to make edits and personalized contributions, as I noted in my Task 2 in the blog post.  In terms of prior experiences or projects that CoPilot might have been useful, I believe that using it to validate information I already created would have been helpful, as in what I found in Task 3 in my blog post. For instance, during my course EDCI 572, when I had to create a fully functioning learning module using the Dick & Carey Model of Instructional Design, I probably could have fed my Design Document or Instructor Guide in to CoPilot to validate learning outcomes, performance objectives, etc. In the future, I will consider doing this to ensure my module reflects what I intended it to reflect, because the AI tools seem to be relatively good at summarizing.

The artifact—my blog post evaluating the three tasks I gave CoPilot—works well for this challenge because I analyzed and synthesized what I found after prompting the AI tool to do typical ID-related tasks. I brought in outside research from a US government publication on Copyright law and AI and related it to practical matters in the professional life of an ID. I learned a lot in the experience because I was creative in how I prompted the AI tool to do a variety of tasks, and through an iterative process of asking and re-asking, I found both the benefits and limitations of the tool for ID-specific tasks. I will continue looking at how AI tools can be used to inform ID processes and my designs, and I will absolutely keep the copyright limitations in mind for any future use of AI in my professional work. The technology is only going to continue advancing, so I must stay informed. I found several YouTube creators that talk about AI in ID, so I am going to stay abreast and choose to use or not to use based on what I find out from those sources.

Artifact  

My Learning Design Blog post entitled, "Identifying Useful AI Integrations with Instructional Design."