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.

By default, 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 Workflows

Depending on your preference, you can either make use of Blackboard’s Design Assist or manually create conversations. Using Design Assist has the added advantage of allowing you to utilise existing content found within your module. This can not only speed up your workflow, but also potentially elevate the conversation as it will be using rich and varied content. When creating a conversation manually (outlined below), you will need to manually type in the content that you wish the conversation to be about.

For both approaches, start by hovering your mouse over the space in the module where you want the conversation to appear. Click the PLUS icon, and select Create. The side panel will appear to the right, and under Participation and Engagement select AI Conversation.

Auto-generate Conversation

To use the Design Assist approach click on Auto-generate conversation in the top right hand corner. Over to the left you can define how the conversation should be populated. If you wish, enter a text based prompt. You can also click Select Course Items. This will then let you select content that’s in the module, such as Blackboard Documents, PDFs, PowerPoints and so on. You can select as many items as you wish. If you use this option, remember to click Select Items when finished.

Decide on which Conversation type you want to generate, or let the tool randomly choose by selecting Inspire Me! Decide which elements you’d like the tool to generate for you: Title, Persona and/or Reflective Question. Decide on the Complexity of the conversation (from Low to High, with a range of 10 options). Click Generate when done. Depending on your choices, the Design Assist will go ahead and generate your conversation, giving you a choice of 3 to choose from. If none are appropriate, you can adjust any of the settings and try again. Assuming one of the conversations is appropriate, select it using the radial button and click Add (bottom right of the screen).

Once selected, you can edit the conversation by clicking the three dots next to the grade pill.

Manual Creation

Creating AI Conversations manually can be broken down into five stages:

1. Select the type of conversation (Socratic Questioning or Role Play)
2. Define the Conversation Settings (and decide whether you wish to impose a limit to the number of messages a student creates)
3. Define the AI Persona
4. Determine a reflective question for students to complete after their conversation
5. Adjust the Settings of the conversation

Socratic 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

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.

For both Socrative Questioning and Role Play, you can determine the number of messages a student can send. Under Conversation Settings, you can open Conversation Constraints and this will let you put in a number to cap the conversation if so desired.

AI Persona

In both types of conversation, you define the AI persona that the students will engage with. You can choose an avatar to reflect the AI persona, give the persona a name, 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

To the right, you can see the most common Conversation Settings. 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. If you want to access more settings, click the cog icon in the top right of the page. From here, you have the full range of settings (such as Time Limits 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.

Click Save when finished to record  your changes.