FeedbackFruits Engagement Assistant: Leveraging AI to enhance active learning and engagement

The challenge of creating engaging guided interactive activities

Enriching study materials with guided discussion and question prompts has been proven to be an effective way to encourage active student engagement with the content. By responding to the annotated questions, students are prompted to carefully study the materials, thus gaining a deeper understanding of the concepts. However, it can take lots of time to come up with quality, meaningful discussions or questions that generate meaningful answers from students. That’s why FeedbackFruits developed the Engagement Assistant, which utilizes AI to auto-generate questions based on the materials

What is the Engagement Assistant?

The feature is designed to automatically generate open-ended questions and corresponding answer based on the content of study materials. This helps save educators valuable time and ensure that the prompts generated are contextually appropriate and pedagogically sound.

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How does the Engagement Assistant work?

The Engagement Assistant feature is intuitive and easy to use. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how faculty can make the most of this tool:

Step 1 - Upload study materials: Instructors upload the chosen study content, it can be a document, video, or audio file to the Interactive Study Material tools

Step 2 - Highlight a section of the materials: Once the content is uploaded, instructors highlight a section (a passage, time frame, image, etc.) from which they want to generate discussion or question prompts.‍

Step 3 - Create a discussion or question card: An option to create a ‘Discussion’ or ‘Question card’ will appear. After selecting, the sidebar will open. If choosing 'Question card', you will have to click on 'Open question'. Right underneath the text box, you will find a 'Suggest' button.

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‍Step 4 - Generate question and answer: By clicking the 'Suggest' button, a question and an answer are automatically generated based on Bloom's Taxonomy and the specific context of the highlighted text.‍

Step 5 - Edit the generated prompts: The generated question and answer appear in the text box, allowing teachers to review and edit them before publishing. This ensures that the final content is tailored to the specific needs of their classroom.

Why you should use the Engagement Assistant?

1. Efficiency and time-saving

Creating thoughtful and effective questions can be time-consuming. The AI-powered question generator significantly reduces this burden by providing instant, context-based suggestions. Instructors can then refine these suggestions, making the process much quicker without compromising on quality.

2. Enhanced question quality

The feature refers to Bloom's Taxonomy to ensure that the questions promote higher-order thinking skills. This means the questions are designed to encourage analysis, evaluation, and creation, rather than simply recalling facts.

3. Consistency and fairness

Instructors can maintain a consistent questioning standard across different sections and topics with the Engage Assist. Providing a standardized approach to question generation minimizes the risk of bias and ensures that all students are challenged appropriately.

4. Flexibility and control

Despite the automation, instructors maintain full control over the content. They can edit both the questions and answers to better fit their teaching style and the specific needs of their students. This combination of automation and customization offers the best of both worlds.

How to use the Engagement Assist in the classroom: Practical applications

Faculty can use Engage Assist to support many learning activities and pedagogical approaches. Below are some examples along with downloadable templates.

1. Interactive assignments

Teachers can use the AI-powered prompts generator to create engaging comprehension assignments. By highlighting key sections of a text, you can quickly generate questions that encourage students to think critically about the material. This activity can be added as a preparation stage in many learning experiences such as team-based learning, flipped classroom, authentic assessment, etc.

Download the activity and learning journey templates:

• Guided reading comprehension
• Pre-class preparation on a document

2. Low-stakes knowledge check

The tool is ideal for low-stakes knowledge checks, providing instant questions that can be used to gauge student understanding in real time. This allows teachers to adjust their instruction based on immediate feedback.

Download the activity and learning journey templates:

• Low-stakes knowledge check

3. Discussion starters

The Engagement Assistant can be used to create thought-provoking questions to serve as a springboard for engaging class discussions. This helps to foster a collaborative learning environment where students are actively engaged in the learning process.

Download the activity and learning journey templates:

• Asynchronous discussion
• Stimulate engaging discussions

Transparency, privacy, and data governance

When working with AI, FeedbackFruits always prioritizes transparency, privacy, and data governance, ensuring that the use of the AI-powered prompts generator aligns with stringent data protection standards.

Data processing

When using the Auto-suggest feature, the highlighted text and an image of the document's page are sent to the Azure OpenAI Service. Here, the text undergoes tokenization before being processed by the AI model, which generates the questions and answers based on custom instructions provided by FeedbackFruits.

Privacy assurance

Teachers’ input data is not used to train or improve any AI models. The Azure OpenAI Service processes the data solely to generate suggestions, and this data is stored for up to 30 days to monitor for abuse and misuse. This system ensures that all data handling complies with data residency requirements and institutional agreements.

Content moderation and abuse monitoring

To ensure appropriateness and safety, the generated content undergoes moderation. Azure’s Content Moderation System and Abuse Monitoring System filter out harmful or inappropriate content. In case of detected misuse, authorized personnel review the data and take necessary actions to prevent further issues.

Read Transparency note: Engagement Assistant to learn more about our privacy and ethical commitment

Future developments

Currently, the AI-powered prompts generator is in its Alpha stage and available in Europe, the US, and Canada. However, there are exciting developments on the horizon:

• Expanded availability: The feature will eventually be available for other Interactive Study Material tools, broadening its utility.

Conclusion

The AI-powered Prompt Coach marks our next step in harnessing the power of AI to support institutions to elevate the teaching and learning quality.

By automating the creation of high-quality, context-based questions, the feature doesn’t only save time but also ensures that the questions are pedagogically sound and designed to promote critical thinking. As the Engagement Assistant continues to be improved, it holds the potential to further transform the way educators engage with their students, making learning more interactive and effective.

For more details on how to use the Engagement Assistant feature and to stay updated on its latest developments, visit the FeedbackFruits Help Center.