Beyond the Basics: My six favourite ways to use AI in teaching

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If you’re like most university educators, you’ve likely used AI for creating quizzes, role plays, or case studies. However, there are other, less obvious ways AI can assist you in teaching. In this blog post, I’ve hand-picked six ways you can use AI to make your teaching more fun and effective!

From Dull to Dazzling: Wave Your AI Wand

Let’s face it—not all of us have the natural flair for explaining concepts like Dr. Karl or other great edutainers. Many of us default to a familiar academic style, filled with nuanced explanations, intricate details, and long words. But how do students often receive it? In one ear and out the other.

Research also suggests that the longer you’ve been immersed in a discipline, the harder it becomes to explain concepts in a way that resonates with a fresh audience. You may inadvertently skip over foundational points or forget what can be confusing for someone encountering the material for the first time. As a result, students miss the opportunity to fully digest and connect with the content.

Enter AI.

Clear explanations

If you ask AI to provide clear and simple explanations with everyday examples (the latter being especially important), it can help you connect complex topics to relatable metaphors or real-world applications that make the information stick. For instance, here’s an example of how AI can assist in explaining the concept of sampling distribution.

 

2. Energisers  

Imagine it’s mid-lecture, and you notice students’ attention starting to wane. It’s time for an energiser! One idea is to present two humorous explanations of your topic and ask students to vote on their favourite. For example, you might use AI to generate explanations of sampling distribution in the styles of Homer Simpson and James Bond.

 

The result?
Students get a laugh, but more importantly, they engage with two additional explanations of the topic—helping reinforce their understanding while staying energised.

You could also take this further by running a playful poll, such as asking students to vote on:
"If sampling distribution were…?" Let AI help you generate creative and engaging options. See examples below.

 

3. Narrative hooks and cliff-hangers

Why are so many of us hooked on TV shows? We become invested in the characters and can’t wait to see what happens next. This same technique can be applied to teaching, and AI can help make it happen. Consider asking AI to craft a story connected to your topic and weave it throughout your lecture or tutorial to keep students engaged and curious.

Why not use a cliff-hanger to spark curiosity and get students excited about your next lecture? For example: “Guess what will happen to ___ next time? What if ___ were to occur? Come to the next lecture to find out!” It might feel a bit cheesy, but it’s undeniably effective. Plus, AI can help you craft these cliff-hangers and plot twists to keep students hooked.

 

4. Audio narrations

Let’s be honest—listening to content is often much easier than reading, especially when multitasking, like driving, exercising, or doing chores. AI can simplify this by helping you create and record short audio summaries of key concepts. For instance, you can ask AI to generate a script, then paste it into one of many text-to-speech tools to produce a ready-to-go audio file. Total time investment? Just a few minutes, and your audio summary is ready to share. You’re welcome!

 

5. Who doesn’t like a good table?

Tables are invaluable for summaries and revision, but creating them can be time-consuming. Fortunately, AI can do it for you! Just input your lecture content into an AI tool and ask it to generate a summary table. It’s quick, efficient, and perfect for helping students review key concepts. See an example below—great for revision!

 

6. A long and boring paper turns into… an engaging podcast!

Have you heard of Google Notebook? It’s a free tool from Google that respects your privacy—it doesn’t use your documents or prompts to train its dataset—and it can magically transform various types of content (like PDFs, videos, and links) into summaries and two-speaker podcasts. For example, you can upload a 30-page journal article, and within 5-10 minutes, you’ll have an easy-to-listen podcast summarizing the content. From my experience, it’s about 95% accurate, though it has its quirks.

How can you use it? You could offer your key readings in both text and podcast formats (with a disclaimer that the podcast is AI-generated) or, better yet, teach students how to use the tool themselves. After all, showing them how to fish is always a valuable skill. Below, you’ll find a quick audio sample I created based on a couple of economics papers.

https://youtu.be/XZHm9Dcy7LE

 

Let me know if you try any of the tips in this blog post! I’d love to hear from you!

 

Image source: ChatGTP generated image

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