Help or hype? AI in learning content

Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.

Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?

Related links:

• Synthetic audio example: Strategies for AI in technical documentation (podcast, English version)
• LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action (podcast)
• How CompTIA rebuilt its content ecosystem for greater agility and efficiency (webinar)
• Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content (podcast)
• Overview of structured learning content
• Get monthly insights on structured content, futureproof content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

• Sarah O’Keefe
• Alan Pringle

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Alan Pringle: Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle, and today I’m talking to Sarah O’Keefe.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody, how’s it going?

AP: And today, Sarah and I want to discuss artificial intelligence and learning content. How can you apply artificial intelligence to learning content? We’ve talked a whole lot, Sarah, about AI and technical communication and product content, let’s talk more about learning and development and how AI can help or maybe not help putting together learning content. So how is it being used right now? Let’s start with that. Do you know of cases? I know of one or two, and I’m sure you do too.

SO: Yeah. So the big news, the big push, is AI in presentations. So how can I use AI to generate my presentation? How can it help me put together my slides? Now, the problem with that from our point of view, for those of you that have been listening to what we’re saying about AI, this will be no surprise whatsoever, I think this is all wrong. It’s the wrong strategy, it’s the wrong approach. If you want to take AI and generate an outline of your presentation and then fill in that outline with your knowledge, that’s great, I think that’s a great idea. Also, if you have existing really good content and you want to take that content and generate slides from it, I don’t have a problem with that. But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say.

AP: And you’re going to say it with very pretty generated images and a level of authority that makes it sound like there’s something that’s actually there when it’s not.

SO: Oh, yeah. It’ll look very plausible and authoritative and it will be wrong, because that’s how this generative stuff-

AP: Or not even wrong, surface-skimmy, just nothing of any real value there.

SO: Yeah. So then, we go into this question of, how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content, how do we advance the cause?

AP: Well, there’s that one case where we have done it, because we have our own learning site, LearningDITA.com, and we were trying to think about ways to apply AI to our efforts to create courses, to tell people how to use the DITA standard for content. And I think you and I both agree, one of the strengths of artificial intelligence is its ability to summarize and synthesize things, I don’t think that’s controversial. So if you think about writing assessments from existing content in a way that’s summarizing, so one of us suggested to our team, why don’t y’all try that and see what these AI engines can do to generate questions from our existing lesson content. And then, of course, we suggested that they—the people who were creating the courses—review them. So our folks reviewed them, and I think some of the questions were actually quite usable, decent.

SO: And some of them were not.

AP: True, this is true.

SO: But the net of it was they saved a bunch of time, because they said, “Generate a bunch of assessment questions,” they went through them, they fixed the ones that were wrong, they improved the ones that were maybe not the greatest, they got a couple that were actually pretty usable. And so, it took less time to write the assessments than it would’ve taken to do that process by hand, to slowly go through the entire corpus to say, “Okay, what are the key objectives and how do I map that to the assessments?” So that’s a pretty good example, I think, of using generative AI, as you said, to summarize down, to synthesize existing content. On the LMS side, so when we start looking at learning management systems and how the learning content goes into the LMS and then is given or delivered to the learner, there are some big opportunities there, because if you think about what it means for me as a learner, as a person taking the course, to work my way through course material, maybe the assumptions that the course developer made about my expertise were too optimistic. I’m really struggling with this content, it’s trying to teach me how to use Photoshop and I am just not good at Photoshop. There’s this idea of adaptive learning, this is not an AI concept, the idea behind adaptive learning is that if you’re doing really well, it goes faster. If you’re struggling, it goes deeper, or maybe you do better with videos than you do with text, or vice versa. It’s that adapt to the learner and to the learner’s needs in order to make the learning more effective. Now, if you think about that, that is a matter of uncovering patterns in how the learner learns and then delivering a better fit for those patterns. Well, that’s AI. AI and machine learning do a great job of saying, “Oh, you seem to be preferring video, so I’m going to feed you more video.” Now, we can do this by hand or we can build it in with personalization logic, but you can also do this at scale with AI and machine learning. So there are definitely some opportunities to improve adaptive learning with an AI backbone.

AP: I think it’s worth noting at this point, when you’re talking about gathering the data to make, I hate to, I’m going to personalize AI, so it can make these decisions or do the synthesis, there’s got to be intelligence that’s built into your content, and that goes all the way back to the content creation, going back from the presentation layer, back to how you’re creating your content. And again, this loops back, in my mind, to the idea of building in that intelligence with structured content, that is your baseline.

SO: Yeah. I know we’re just relentless on this drum of you need structured content for learning content, but it’s because of all these use cases, because as you try to scale this stuff, this is what you’re going to run into. I also see a huge opportunity for translation workflows specifically for learning content. So if you look at translation and multilingual delivery, there’s a lot of AI and machine learning going on in machine translation. So now, we think a little bit about what that means for learning content, and of course, all of the benefits that you get just in general from machine translation still apply, but the one that I’m looking at that I think would be really, really interesting to apply to learning is learning has a lot of audio in it, audio and video, but specifically audio, and audio typically is going to be bound to a language. You’re going to have a voiceover, you’re going to have a person saying, “Here’s what you need to know, and I’m going to show you this screenshot,”