Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Constructive alignment and artificial intelligence.
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Authors
Kirby, J.
Vahl, M.
Keywords
AI
Description of form
Publisher
Rights
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Issue Date
2024-08
Peer-reviewed status
Type
Conference paper
Abstract
This practice paper is an emerging exploration of the connections between the guiding principle of constructive alignment and the uses of artificial intelligence. Our practice is situated in an Open, Distance and Flexible Learning (ODFL) environment, more specifically in the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand | Kuratini Tuwhera o Aotearoa context. Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly embraced by the learning design community for design and development (Davis & Lee, 2024), and at Open Polytechnic, we
internally developed Course-o-Matic, a secure Application Programming Interface (API) that interacts with the OpenAI models. Our research investigates whether, based on the guiding principles of constructive alignment theory, we could use Course-o-Matic to assess the alignment between intended learning outcomes and learning activities. Our methodology involves investigating different prompting strategies, writing prompts that
could allow us to assess the constructive alignment, trialling the prompts using Course-oMatic 3000 and comparing the results from the different prompts with our own observations about the courses. Our results demonstrated that, regardless of the prompting strategy used, AI has the potential to support initial observations about alignment of courseware and provide helpful insights. However, prompts require carefully phrased constraints to ensure AI remains focused on alignment and identifies gaps appropriately. We also found that AI may struggle to adapt its responses to the OFDL context.
Citation
Kirby, J. A., & Maciel Vahl, M. (2024). Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Constructive alignment and artificial intelligence. In J. P. Egan (Ed.), Proceedings of the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand Conference (pp. 106-109). https://flanz.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/flanz-proceedings-final-compressed.pdf