Create Digital Instructional Material using Generative AI

I have been a long time subscriber to CT News Update, a news letter from Campus Technology. In their one of the recent e-newsletters, I came across a brief article about Nolej, a generative AI ed tech startup based in France. The company in collaboration with OpenAI has created an instructional content generator, Nolej AI, for educators and was being offered free for trial. Given that the generative AI technology such as offered by ChatGPT is likely to lead to a quantum change in how we teach and prepare educational material, I decided to take Nolej AI for a spin. This blog post is about my play with it.

Nolej AI is browser-based. To use the system, a user first uploads any type of static content (video, audio, text documents, or a website URL). The system then automatically processes the content and generates a ready-to-assign interactive standalone digital lesson. The resulting lesson includes a content transcript, summaries, a glossary of terms, flashcards, and quizzes. The entire digital lesson is based on the uploaded material. The digital lesson can be downloaded in formats that are compatible with learning systems such as Blackboard, Google Classroom, and Moodle.

The interface is simple. Once, you give a name to the instructional module that you want to create, it asks you to provide the content in one of the three ways as shown.

I decided to use my previously recorded lecture on linear models and entered its link (https://youtu.be/0DADIcPCoS8). A reason other than it was a handy way to provide content was to check how good the transcription would be. The transcription turned out to be good and I didn’t need to do any editing on it although the system provides this feature and moves to the next stage of analyzing the transcript once you okay the transcription.

The system took about 15 minutes to analyze the transcript and created the instructional material based on my lecture. A screenshot of the system after completing the task is shown below.

The resulting material included link to the original video with bookmarks, a summary of the transcribed lecture, glossary, concept cards, flashcards, assessments items, as well as word games based on the content. A screenshot of the “Drag the Word” quiz is shown below just to give you an idea about the type of the created instructional material.

After examining the instructional material produced by the system, I felt that Nolej AI is a great tool to generate instructional material. It appears particularly useful for K-12 education.

Although I provided the content to create the educational material, I am planning to experiment where I will use ChatGPT or some other large language model to create the content for Nolej AI.

To view the material produced by Nolej AI on the topic of linear regression, please click on the image below and let me know what you think of this generative AI tool for creating interactive instructional material.