Getting AI to Write Questions for You

You know you should make your class more active.

Asking students regular, low stakes questions about the key concepts, skills, and process you are teaching is essential. In a 50-minute lesson, it is great to do that 5 times.  You shouldn’t grade any of the questions, and you should asks students to talk with with each other about each one.  Even when you know this is important, it can be hard to do.

Who actually has time?

We wind up avoiding making active learning components because we are already spending so much time making slides of our content and creating assessments. And then we spend even more time marking! The good news is there is now a process where you can get an a generative AI  to do that for you for free, and do it quickly.  It’s called prompting.

Tell generative AI to do it for you.

At the time of the writing of this article, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Copilot in Protected Mode (available through PAWS login) to make the questions for you. Using Microsoft Copilot in Protected Mode will allow you to use a combination of ChatGPT-4 and modern internet access, while protecting your data.

Below is a simple higher education example from faculty experts in generative AI for education with a step by step example of using Microsoft Copilot to create formative (assessment for learning) questions for you.

AI can do much more than just practice questions. You can use AI to make case studies, create good examples, build effective rubrics, and create sample student work for your students to assess. You can prompt it to write like you, and tell it what to focus on the most. Use the prompting process to customize it to your needs.

Learn more:

• Watch a short video summary of What Large Language/Generative AI tools are, and how they work.
• Attend a GMCTL workshop to learn more about using GenAI.

^{Title image credit: Geralt on Pixabay}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.