Introduction
Using Blackboard’s Design Assist functionality, you can create AI Conversations around a topic or scenario to help further your students educational journey. In turn, this will transform your module into a more engaging space. The conversation can be one of two categories: Socratic questioning or a Role-play exercise. Socratic questioning allows students to explore and reflect on their own thoughts through a series of open-ended questions based on a specific topic. Role play allows students to act out a specific scenario with an AI persona.
The conversations are graded, and so appear in the Gradebook. This allows you the opportunity to read through any conversations that have taken place, and give both feedback and a score based on the discussion.
Video Tutorial
The Workflow
Creating AI Conversations is a five stage process:
- Select the type of conversation (Socratic Questioning or Role Play)
- Add Student Instructions
- Define the AI Persona
- Determine a reflective question for students to complete after their conversation
- Adjust the Settings of the conversation
Socratic Questioning
Socratic questioning allows students to develop their critical thinking around a subject through a series of continuous questioning.
Start by defining the conversation by supplying the key topic or question. This in turn will help shape the AI persona. You will be prompted to try and keep the question as open ended as possible, and given the opportunity to view some examples to get you started.
Role Play
Role Play creates a scenario for the students to play out in a safe environment.
Start by defining the scenario. Include information about the scenario itself, the students role to play in the scenario, the role of the AI persona and what the student is attempting to achieve in the role play. As above, the tool will provide you with some examples of the types of prompts to include.
AI Persona
In both types of conversation, you are able to define the AI persona that the students will engage with. You can choose an avatar to reflect the AI persona and define the required personality traits. The final stage is to decide the complexity of the responses on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 being the most basic and 10 being the most complex.
Reflection Question
By default, the standard reflexion question “In what ways did the conversation advance your understanding of the topic?” will be included. Click the three dots to the right hand side to edit this reflection question to tailor it to your specific needs.
AI Conversation Settings
Click the cog icon in the top right hand corner to open the Conversation Setting panel. These are the same as the Settings you would see in a test. You can adjust things like the Due Date (or remove it), the number of attempts a student can have, and so on.
Down at the bottom of the Settings panel, it is recommended to include a Description. This descriptive text will be visible to students before they start the conversation, and so provide them with context of the conversation.