Can AI Develop Your E‑Learning? It Sure Can Help.
Practical Ways to Use AI to Improve E-Learning Development
There’s a lot of hype about how artificial intelligence (AI) could eventually be used to take over all kinds of tasks, including development of an e-learning course from start to finish (i.e., gathering content, designing the course, and developing it). A lofty goal? Perhaps. However, I do think AI can help with custom e-learning development when it’s used in practical ways.
Here are some ideas!
Text to Speech
AI allows for converting text to speech that’s good enough to be used in most e-learning courses. Although there can sometimes be issues getting the phonetics right for AI to pronounce proper nouns, there are huge benefits — no need to wait for voice talent to be available and no cost with booking the talent. Additionally, pickups are identical for everything except what was changed, which makes it much easier to adjust synching in e-learning authoring tools.
Here are a couple of text-to-speech tools I’ve tried so far:
Speech to Text
AI also makes it easy to generate transcripts from existing audio or video files. You may have to make some changes to the transcript, which is generated automatically, but this will almost always be faster than transcribing the audio manually.
These are some speech-to-text tools I’ve used and had good results:
Audio Editing
Speech-to-text tools make audio editing easier when they’re able to line up the audio waveforms with the corresponding text. You can select what needs to be cut simply by clicking on the words.
An example is:
Text to Video
Building on the capabilities of text-to-speech, text-to-video goes one step further by adding a talking-head video dubbed to match the audio script. Depending on which provider you use, the dubbing might be a little better or a little worse; but in my testing, I didn’t find any that were perfect.
These are the text-to-video tools I’ve tried:
Content Outlines and First Draft of Content
Starting with something is often easier than starting from a blank page. If you enter a task, AI can create a content outline of everything that should be taught. Below I’ve listed some content outline requests I’ve tested:
- How to Refinish a Deck
- Keeping Computer Security Up to Date
- How to Perform CPR
- How to Play Cello
- How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich
The results produced were remarkably credible in all five cases. With some of these, I was able to produce complete written content that teaches the entire task. I was even able to have an AI narrator read the script in a video that had built-in text-to-video capability.
The program I used was:
Slides and Infographics
Not interested in spending your time gathering data, entering it in Excel, and going through the steps to create charts? You can skip those tasks by letting AI step in to handle it for you. I’ve received great results for:
- An infographic showing VR market share by industry
- Roles needed to create e-learning
To test this out, I used:
Text to Image
AI now lets you type-in a text description, and an image is created for you in a style of your choosing. I found that multiple tries were often needed to get an image that was what I really wanted; but after a few tries, I was pleased with the results.
I’ve tried using these two text-to-image tools:
Writing and Editing
There’s no argument that well-written content makes learning so much better. So why not get a little help from AI? Maybe you just need the help of an expert AI editor, or maybe you need help with what to write next. Here are two writing and editing programs I’ve tested:
So, there you have it… eight ways AI can help you create e-learning. Yes, it may still be a while until AI handles entire course creation from start to finish, but these examples should be enough to convince you that AI is already able to handle some parts and pieces of the process. And, if you approach custom e-learning development practically, you may be able to gain some efficiencies when using some of the tools I’ve mentioned.
