Instructional Design 

AI Design Assistant: Auto-generate AI Conversations – 3900.116 

Impact: Instructors 
Updated Help Page: AI Conversation 
Idea Exchange ID: Not applicable 

Instructors 

The AI Design Assistant can now auto-generate AI Conversations. AI Conversations are conversations between students and an AI persona. 

  • Socratic Questioning: Conversations that encourage students to think critically through continuous questioning.
  • Role-play: Conversations that allow students to play out scenarios with the AI persona, enhancing their learning experience.

Creating personas and topics for an AI Conversation can take a lot of time. To streamline this process, the AI Design Assistant can generate three suggestions at once. You can select what the AI Design Assistant generates. You can choose to generate: 

  • AI Conversation title
  • AI persona
  • Reflection question 

These suggestions provide inspiration for an AI Conversation. Instructors can refine the AI Design Assistant’s suggestions in several ways:

  • Provide additional context
  • Adjust the complexity of the question
  • Select context from the course
  • Manually revise the question 

The time saved by auto-generating AI Conversations allows instructors to focus more on embedding AI Conversations into their courses. 

Image 1. The auto-generate feature is now available in AI Conversations.

The New AI Conversation page, with Auto-generate conversion highlighted in the top right

Image 2. There are several ways to customize AI Conversations.

The Auto-Generate Conversation page, with customization options on the left and generated AI Conversations on the right

Administrators 

Availability: Available for all Ultra courses. 

Activation: None needed. 

Configuration: In the building block, AI Design Assistant and Unsplash, a new option called Generate Conversations is available. The default state is off.  When this feature is turned on, the privilege needs to be assigned to course roles, such as Instructor. The required privilege is Use AI Design Assistant. When someone with that role creates an AI Conversation, the Auto-Generate Conversation option is available. Turning off Generate Conversations after deployment will remove instructors' permission to generate AI Conversations. However, AI Conversations will still work if Socratic or role-play conversations are turned on.

Return to May 2025 – 3900.116.0 Release description