What is Blackboard’s AI Design Assistant?

Blackboard Ultra has integrated AI into a tool known as the AI Design Assistant, to assist instructors with setting up and creating a course. The AI Design Assistant can:

• Generate Modules and Course Structures
• Generate Journal, Discussion and Assignment topics
• Generate Rubrics
• Generate Test Questions
• Generate Question Banks
• Generate or Find Relevant Images

Before and after creating content using the AI Design Assistant, please note: Faculty must review all AI-generated content before use, because AI may generate inaccurate or culturally insensitive information!

Is the AI Design Assistant Safe to Use?

The AI Design Assistant uses Microsoft Responsible AI framework. Anthology assured us that while our input data is used to train and improve AI Design Assistant, the data stays within Humber and isn’t shared with external organizations (Data Privacy Approach | Anthology). For more information about Anthology’s AI Approach, read their Trust Worthy AI Approach, which includes the following principles:

• humans in control,
• fairness,
• privacy,
• security, and
• safety.

How do I generate Question Banks in Blackboard?

Using question banks is an efficient way to use and reuse questions in your Blackboard course. However, it can take a significant amount of time to setup question banks. The AI Design Assistant can offer quick suggestions for questions in a question bank, giving you extra time to focus on other tasks. The AI Design Assistant is beneficial for both formative and summative assessments, and can use your course context if you select it. Learn more about AI Generated Question Banks on Blackboard’s website, or watch the video that follows:

These are the step-by-step instructions:

• Go to Question Banks from the Course Content page.
• Go to create a new item and select Auto-generate.

• You have several ways to refine the questions that the AI Design Assistant generates.

• • Enter a description (limited to 2000 characters) to narrow the focus of the questions
  • You can select from the following question types:
    • Essay
    • Fill in the blank
    • Matching
    • Multiple choice
    • True/False
    • The “Inspire Me” question type suggests a variety of question types to give you more options at the same time.
  • Adjust the complexity of the questions
    • There are ten levels included in the complexity level slider:
      • Early primary school
      • Late primary school
      • Early middle school
      • Late middle school
      • Early high school
      • Late high school
      • Undergraduate lower division
      • Undergraduate upper division
      • Graduate level
      • Advanced PhD level
  • Select the number of questions (up to 20)
  • Select Advanced options to change the output language
  • Optionally, you can select which course items you’d like the AI Design Assistant to provide context for questions. Select Select course items to start. Select any course content item to include it in the context for your question.

• Once you’ve finalized your settings, select Generate. Choose the questions that you’d like to add to your Question Bank, then select Add to Question Bank.
• Make sure to review each question for accuracy. You can also edit questions to better fit your learning goals.

What are Innovative Learning’s recommendations for using the question bank generation feature in Blackboard’s AI Design Assistant?

• It is recommended to post a document directly to Blackboard if you intend to use it as context using the context picker for Question Bank generation.
• Providing examples of calculation and logic questions generates new calculation and logic questions. However, the AI seems to struggle to generate any new scenarios or word problems.
• You may require multiple attempts to get the desired number of questions that are usable with minor edits.

Contact the Innovative Learning Support Centre if you need support. We are here to help!