#54 - Creating a learning session - 3

In issue 52 - "Creating a learning session - 1" & issue 53 - "Creating a learning session - 2" we began putting a learning session together using some AI tools. We started with our audience and asked 3 key "audience discovery" questions, then we expanded our outline and material with a clear brief, a hook to grab attention, followed by sourcing and grounding in relevant models and theory.

So now we've got our material, how to we present it?

Death by Powerpoint is a horrible way to go...

When creating new learning sessions I'm increasingly moving away from PowerPoint towards Notion. Now much of my teaching is done online, so a scrolling Notion document is easy for me to navigate sitting in front of the computer - I realise that if you are physically in front of a class then clicking through slides may be easier as a way of moving through material. And Notion offers a free account to educators...

But moving into a different type of presentation from endless slides seems to resonate with my students - be they university, corporate, non-profit or hobby learners.

I now assemble a running order of ideas, supported by links to web-pages & tools, with embedded videos and other documents, so the students have immediate access to all the varied things that I want them to explore during (and after) our session.

Publish your Notion page as a website

When I've assembled my initial page, I go to the Share menu and then Publish the page as a web-page. It gets a persistent URL that I share with the class in the chat or I can put the link in the LMS.

Here's one example of such a session website - a session on The Future of AI that I ran last January for the IMCA - Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers:

Update as you go along

Here's what I love about using this approach. I ask my students to be active in the chat, and contribute links to other useful resources that they know of. As these are added, I can copy/paste them straight into the Notion doc, and this updates the webpage in real time, so we build a richer, co-created set of learning resources driven by the collective knowledge and insights of the whole class.

This is a wow moment for many who see it in action for the first time. Student feel a sense of agency - they are part now of the learning experience in a much more active, participatory way than simply consuming the pearls of wisdom that I decide to hand down.

If we do a breakout session, I can ask teams to output a PDF of their outputs and we can then include these in the Notion page - sharing multiple insights and providing a far richer set of materials by the end than my initial notes.

I also use Perplexity to quickly generate Pages if we get a question that I can't answer in class - and then I can put the link to the Perplexity Page in the Notion doc as well so everyone get's the benefit of the question having been answered. This can be done in real-time during the class - I can even show everyone how it's done on screen while I'm generating the Page.

Over-teaching

This is something that I've become more aware of the longer I've been teaching - the trap of trying to cram too much "stuff" into a given session. Using the approach above, I tend now to populate a rough outline of some things I think we should cover, front loading key knowledge at the front so this is certainly going to be covered. Further down, the middle section materials are the should have stuff I'd ideally like to investigate, and then at the bottom are additional resources - we'll probably not get to these directly in class but for those who have been fired up by this session, there's more to read and explore here.

Frequent breaks

I learned this years ago, and always apply it in any class, in-person or online. Teach in no more than 45 min sections - in a 3 hr class I have 2 or even 3 ten or fifteen minute breaks. It sounds counter-intuitive, but these frequent, short breaks give the students (and me!) a mental reset and so many remark on how they are recharged for the next session...

Here's a Perplexity page I generated with some other recognised strategies to combat over-teaching:

What do YOU do, and why?

I'd LOVE to hear other ideas from you on effective teaching strategies - please drop me a line at [email protected] or put your ideas (and links) in the comments. I've just outlined my current approach, and it's probably flawed ad could be better, so all ideas and inputs welcome!

A WOW moment... an audio podcast created from uploaded text files

Every now and then you come across something that really makes you go "WOW - that is amazing!". Well, spend 3 (VERY worthwhile) minutes watching the start of this video about the capabilities of Google NotebookLM to convert uploaded material into a podcast style audio track - this is just fabulous!

UCD's SATLE team released 2 guides this week - one for students, the other for lecturers, covering AI usage. I dropped the weblink for the student one into NotebookLM and asked it to create one of these podcast audio tracks - here's a link to the Notebook - click on Notebook Guide in the bottom right and then play the Audio Overview in the top right corner of the popup screen...

AI in UCD

The student guide is here:

... and the faculty guide is here:

New podcast Bridges & Bytes - student voice on AI

This 6-part series from the UCD College of Engineering and Architecture explores the role of AI in education from a student perspective. Each episode focusing on a specific aspect of AI in education, will be insightful for educators, students, policymakers and those responsible for designing assessments in both school and university settings.?The first full episode will drop on Monday of Week 2 (16th Sept 2024), and further episodes will drop every fortnight after that until the end of term.

The first season of?Bridges and Bytes?is available to stream now on all major podcast platforms. To stay updated with new episodes and insights, follow the podcast on?Spotify,?Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And while we're on podcasts, we dropped episode 5 of the ILOTA Things podcast last week, looking at how AI can help create visual but accessible materials for teaching and learning:

CANVA & Affinity are free for teachers

If you have a recognised education institution email address you should be able to use CANVA and now the whole Affinity suite (on computer and tablet) for free! Get signed up here:

And Monday.com also has a free option available to educators and students from recognised Higher Education institutions - I use this with all my Project Management students and it's a fabulous tool for creating plans and collaborating on projects:

New free lesson planner tool for UK teachers...

OK, enough for today - off to college to teach my full-time PM class now! See you next time!

EPALE - The European Adult Learning Network

Do you know about EPALE - the European Adult Learning Network? I'm one of the Irish Ambassadors for EPALE, and you can join over 100,000 educators across Europe in a free online community - it's a great way to get different points of view, participate in training from across the continent and stay up to date on educational thought. Create your free account at https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/user/login

Affiliate Links (stuff I use and recommend)

Perplexity AI - Best search and my go-to AI now... Uses the latest top AI models from ChatGPT, Claude et al, innovates constantly - give it a try!

https://perplexity.ai/pro?referral_code=VYD33BFN

Unriddle AI is a research site that lets you upload docs and then interrogate them.

https://www.unriddle.ai//?ref=JH

Check out Humata - it's another AI that let's you work on your own documents and interrogate them. https://www.humata.ai/?via=joe-houghton

My tool of choice for serious AI image creation is Leonardo. The user interface is easy and very powerful, enabling you to create just what you want in any style really quickly. https://app.leonardo.ai/?via=joe

Notion

This is my tool of choice now for collecting all the bits'n'pieces of information I squirrel away for talk, articles and presentations. I can then generate webpages in a snap and share them, and they update in real-time as I add new info to them! There's so much you can do in Notion - well worth a look:

Joe Houghton is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he directs the MSc programmes in Project Management. After a career in IT in multinationals, Joe switched into a portfolio career of University teaching, management coaching and training.

He has authored 7 books to date including "Innovative teaching with AI: Creative approaches to enhancing learning in education", "Project Management made easy...: the ECCSR approach" & "Applying Artificial Intelligence to Close the Accessibility Gap: A practical handbook for educators & students!" His latest release "Study Smart with AI - 150 essential apps "is now available on Amazon! More on this in a future edition...

Contact Joe on email at [email protected] for any requests for training, seminars, workshops or keynote speaking.