HBCUs Experiment With AI Chatbot That Helps Educators Plan Lessons

Feldstein was the chief accountability officer at e-Literate, a publication dedicated to explaining educational technology (edtech). Now, he serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at 1EdTech, a leading member of a nonprofit edtech partnership dedicated to transforming the digital learning landscape.

ALDA is a learning chatbot that can help educators create initial drafts of courses, syllabi, and lesson plans. “ALDA asks you questions about what you want to accomplish and then helps you meet your own goals,” Feldstein says in a press release.“

“It’s a very different experience from opening a browser window and being faced with an empty box that you need to fill. ALDA starts asking them if they would like help designing a lesson.”

What does ALDA do?

It can sometimes take educators hours to plan a single assignment or learning objective. ALDA aims to minimize the time it takes faculty to plan a lesson. The tool can help instructional designers with designing a course and faculty with designing specific assignments.

During the course, the tool helped faculty with course preparation, streamlined content creation, and addressed learning design bottlenecks, all while achieving an approximate 20% increase in efficiency, according to findings from the UNCF’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC).

“It does allow you to cut down that planning and development time; it did streamline that,” Jessica Bynum, adjunct faculty at Miles College and instructor at Jefferson State Community College, who participated in the project, said.

ALDA is even helpful for people with experience with AI, according to Feldstein. “ALDA demonstrates that AI is designed to act as an interviewer and assistant, while coaching the educator on how they want to be interviewed. It encourages educators to use AI to create interesting and creative lessons,” he adds.

UNCF’s Member Institutions Testing ALDA

Feldstein wanted to test ALDA with faculty and instructional designers, as both groups can benefit from the tool. The ALDA Design/Build Workshop series focuses on the ethical use of AI, workflow optimization, and prompt engineering.

Several HBCUs that are also UNCF member institutions, such as Bethune-Cookman University, Florida Memorial University, Johnson C. Smith University, Miles College, and Shaw University, participated in the workshops.

“While the Gates Foundation grant that supported this phase of the ALDA project has concluded, the work is far from over. UNCF’s Teaching and Learning Center remains committed to equipping our institutions—and our faculty—with the tools and training necessary to thrive in an AI-integrated future,” Geneva Dampare, director of strategy and operations, Teaching and Learning Center, UNCF, said.