GLOKALde April 2024, ISSN 2148-7278 Volume: 10 Issue: 1, Article 1
USING GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO DESIGN
A COLLEGE ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCE COURSE
ABSTRACT
It has only been one year since an easy-to-use, widely available generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) service has been available. Open AI Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is a large language model (LLM)-based chatbot that was launched in late November 2022. ChatGPT uses natural language processing to create human-like conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code, and emails. This paper intends to use ChatGPT (and a similar GenAI service, Anthropic Claude for comparison) to design a college environmental science course using a foundational backward design model (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Backward design typically includes three major steps, Results (learning outcomes), Evidence (assessment), and Experience (teaching methods, curriculum). The goal of this paper is to determine how effective GenAI could be at designing a course. The steps that were taken include using GenAI to create a concept outline from the course title; then using the outline to create active, conceptual learning outcomes (LOs); and then creating authentic assessments with analytical rubrics. All of this information would be entered into a GenAI platform to create a course schedule, slide outlines, and syllabus.