Can AI Alleviate Faculty Burnout? AI Tools for University Faculty, Part 2: AI for faculty teaching-

The faculty duty which takes the most of my time is teaching. Specifically, lecture, activity, exercise and assignment generation.

I like to change and update course readings, lectures, activities, exercises and assignments frequently to ensure I am engaging my students. And naturally, the needed grading from all of these activities fills the remainder of my teaching time.

I decided to look into the AI tools now available to help alleviate some of those pressure points in my schedule.

1) Curipod. With Curipod, you can give the software the topic for the lesson, select the grade from 1st - 13th or professional development, write the learning objective and standards and bam! Lesson slides done!

And Curipod has a free version!

However, this tool seems like it would be most helpful basic knowledge. For my topic of “Cellulosic fiber properties” it only presented such basic information, had an inaccurate statement and asked a concept quiz question over material it did not add to the lesson plan.

The software does allow you to edit the slides generated so if you catch something off, it’s a simple fix.

2) Otter.ai Next I decided to look at tools that would translate spoken words into usable lecture notes. Writing comprehensive summaries for students’ reading has historically taken me quite a long time, roughly 6 hours per 1 hour lecture. As books and textbook pdf files are protected from copying and pasting the text outside of the file, I decided taking audio notes that could be transcribed offered the most promise for cutting down the time to generating summaries for my course.

Otter “records audio and automatically takes notes in real time, so that you can focus on the discussion.”

Reducing background noise and the number of speakers in an audio file will help the transcription accuracy.

My lecture videos are getting a bit dated.

I want to update them in a way that there is automated voice spoken from written text, synced with an artificial instructor "speaking" the words. That way, whenever I need to make a change in the future, I can change the text and not have to re-film everything. I started digging for something to help with these tasks.

And Yep, there’s an AI for that! Enter-

3) synthesia. I’m starting to like the future! The AI generated person looks realistic enough but I can really tell that this is an AI voice. However, the flow is not jarring like I have previously heard computer generated voices be and the words match the speaking mouth.

This option can be a little pricey, starting at $270 a year for the personal account which allows you to make 10 minutes of AI generated video a month.

The video I received did have some elements I would want to alter, like background music and the volume of the initial video wasn't able to be adjusted while the video was playing.

4) Gradescope.

Already in use by some universities, Gradescope is “a feedback and assessment tool meant to reduce the effort and time associated with grading exams, homework, and other assignments.”

The biggest claim to fame for this software is that it allows for question by question grading, minimizing the impact of bias or mood from the instructor.

The software can also reduce grading time by grouping similar answers together, allowing the instructor to send replies to the similar answers and assign a grade to the question group.

The Basic Plan is free, while the paid Institutional plan offers more functions like AI grading.

And DallE, Fotor AI Image Generator or Stable Diffusion if you’re in the mood for some AI generated images!

Next week, we'll dive into some AI programs geared towards research and service. See you then!