AI in Curriculum Development: Opportunities and Challenges

AI is transforming education and learning and is being used in a variety of ways ranging from course and lesson planning to assessing and even tutoring. The global market value of AI in education is projected to increase by over 45% CAGR between 2022 and 2030.

One of the most significant uses of AI in education is in designing and developing a curriculum. AI in curriculum development allows for a completely new process of creating learning content and developing lesson programs.

With the rapid development of AI technology in learning and development, the future of instructional design is changing. 

Table of Contents:

• What are the Benefits and Opportunities?
• Challenges for AI in Curriculum Development
• Summing Up
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the Benefits and Opportunities? 

Benefits of AI in Curriculum Development

There are several benefits that AI can bring to the process of curriculum development. According to research, 20% to 40% of the current workload of teachers can be automated. AI offers several opportunities for educators, which are explained below. 

• Jumpstarting Course Design

AI can help jumpstart course design and get course designers through the most challenging part of course design: coming up with lesson plans. It can provide a great starting point and initiate ideas to get a course started. It can generate a course design based on the prompt you provide and come up with an outline for a lesson.

An AI curriculum for schools has several features and advantages. AI can generate question banks and lesson introductions, saving time spent on coming up with many questions for multiple assessments and time spent on developing diverse introductions for different lessons.

Further, AI can help you develop the course based on specific prompts. It can also summarise the content and identify issues in the way your content is aligned and organized. 

AI can provide course objectives, ensure that there is a standard scope for each module, and maintain a sequence between different lessons or units. One of the major benefits of AI in school curriculum is that it allows you to create standardized and streamlined content that follows a continuous outline or pattern.

AI can also help educators come up with rubrics or improve their existing rubrics, objectives, and criteria for assessments and assignments. Using AI tools, you can come up with content that is targeted towards a specific audience. AI can provide topics for lessons and important subtopics to cover within those lessons. It can even provide assessments based on the lesson. 

In these ways, AI can provide a great starting point from which you can continue designing lessons. Most importantly, it can jumpstart your thinking on particular topics and provide useful pointers for course content, based on which you can further elaborate the material. 

Also Read: The Difference Between Course Design Vs Course Development

• Assessment and Discussion 

AI helps with curriculum development but also helps with implementing the curriculum and further stages of the teaching process, such as assessments and discussions. 

Many students are reluctant to ask questions in a classroom. AI allows for functionalities like virtual instructors, which can clarify topics and answer questions. The advantage of such one-to-one sessions is that the students feel more comfortable in clarifying doubts, leading to a more thorough learning experience.

The AI instructor can pick up on the student’s specific style of learning as well as their current level of knowledge. This enables it to provide customized feedback based on the correct level of information. 

An AI high school curriculum also allows for more complex forms of assessment. Instead of just multiple-choice questions, instructors can design more enhanced forms of assessment and feedback based on the individual learner’s knowledge level and learning style. 

• Feedback

An artificial intelligence curriculum can enable educators to design appropriate content based on the correct level of knowledge. It can also help them design the right kind of assessment based on feedback that it picks up from learners. With an online AI curriculum, curriculum designers can spend more time creating the instruction, assessment, and feedback.

AI in the school’s curriculum reduces the element of guessing that is involved in curriculum development since educators have a better sense of the requirements of their audience and can design material based on the correct audience. 

Based on the AI feedback, instructional designers can apply the correct level of knowledge based on the learners and use the feedback to create further content. AI can also assist in identifying gaps in a curriculum based on the performance of students and the results of assessments. 

It can help educators better understand the impact of their course on learners and adapt the course load accordingly. This helps mitigate or reduce any negative effects of cognitive load. In other words, it helps ensure there is no cognitive overload. 

AI offers the ability to create more individualized learning experiences to suit different kinds of student requirements. It can help educators provide a more comprehensive explanation to enhance a student’s understanding. It can come up with suggestions for various assessments and help develop content for different levels of understanding. 

It can suggest language accommodations and create materials for special needs students. It could also be used to develop alternative assignments and convert content into simpler content or language. 

Also Read: Transforming Education with AI: Innovations in Curriculum Design