Case study: Using Gen AI to create revision tests

School for School for Business and Society
Caroline Chaffer

Caroline Chaffer describes how she used Google Gemini and the Blackboard Ultra AI Design Assistant tool to create revision tests based on her materials for an introductory Accounting module to support direct entry students starting their studies in York.

She provides a demonstration of the process and points to positive outcomes from both the teacher and student perspective. The tests are being actively used by students and Caroline points to be time saving brought by using the tools to automate some of the more challenging aspects of the test creation process.

Watch their presentation:

Using Gen AI to create revision tests (Panopto viewer) (7 mins 54 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi everybody. So I just wanted to share my experiences of using, Gen AI or Gemini and the quiz tools in the VLE. So I'm just going to share my share my slides. Bear with me one second. Right. So just to kind of give you the give you the context. So within the school we have um, had a lot of students joining us in year two from overseas institutions. And I'm looking at this in the context of our accounting programs. And what we're doing to help the students settle in, there is some assumed - there is an assumption that they have covered the course content of our first year programs, but they do need some support in terms of maybe bridging their learning. Maybe in terms of terminology, for example, or some core techniques. So I've been running a revision classes for the students. And I guess when you're running revision classes, one thing I wanted to do was create an interactive quiz for them, or a quiz for them, just to check their knowledge and something they could do in their own time. So I just started to explore how I might do this using gen AI because obviously, I guess we're all aware creating multiple choice questions is actually quite time consuming and probably a little bit boring, but really important.

So I just wanted to kind of talk you through my process because I felt like I learned quite a lot when I was doing this. And the investment up front really made it quick to do in the end. But I guess if I share that, it might help other people if you want to do a similar thing. So save you a lot, quite a lot of time. So. So what I did was I originally created a quiz in Gemini. I didn't really know actually at the time, if I'm being honest, the capability in the VLE. But - so I originally created a quiz on Gemini, and basically where I started to, to do my prompts, just ask them to write. Ask Gemini to write 20 multiple choice questions and specified the particular accounting area that I wanted them to look at. And there's some quite fundamental accounting techniques and terms. So, you know, double entry bookkeeping for those that don't know is a core technique. So I'd hope that Gemini would recognise it's quite a standard terminology. So I effectively created the quizzes in Gemini and refined the questions through kind of different prompts to Gemini. So we could get the terminology right and getting it looking okay.

And for me I can actually - you can actually create quizzes I found out in in the VLE automatically. But my approach would, would now be to do them in Gemini first, because it's much easier to refine them and work with Gemini to get it right before I uploaded it into the into the VLE. So that that was the first thing I did. I then thought, obviously I've written this multiple choice quiz. Actually, my original thinking I was going to upload it onto the VLE as it is. And thought, well actually I want to make it interactive. As in the students isn't just reading questions on a on a word document. So I uploaded it onto the VLE and I was thinking I was going to have to type kind of questions in myself and noticed on the VLE that there is the create new content test auto generation, which I'll show you in a minute, optionality. which essentially allows you to upload materials into blackboard and based on those materials and the VLE will create you an interactive quiz for you. So that's what that's what I use. You can then edit it and then copy it onto your main VLE site. So I created this in my sandpit site first because I was uploading some core materials that could go out of date. So I just kept them in the sandpit. So that's what I did. I was going to show you how I. How I did it. For those that may have not used. I hadn't used these tools before.

So this is my sandpit site. So what I did in the kind of the content area, you'll see I've got week one quiz materials. So I just uploaded my word documents that I'd done from Gemini, which had my questions in there. Like I said, I put them in the sandpit page because I'm going to use this quiz hopefully for a number of years, but that core document will start to look aged on the VLE. And I think it comes up, um, in terms of housekeeping, having old documents on there as told wasn't isn't the right thing to do. So that's there. So basically I clicked the plus button to create new content. And in terms of my selection, I went into assessments and clicked test and I got this screen, which is creating a new test so I could type in 'week one revision' to to name it. And then if I go on to the create your content, there was an option there to auto generate questions which I hadn't seen before. So in order to generate questions and you can actually then select course items that you want the questions to be based on. So I'd uploaded my materials from Gemini and essentially I've got those in my content. So I selected them. And in other quizzes I actually selected some module materials, some PowerPoint slides or week one materials. But this just example here, I'm just using the quiz that I created in Gemini, which I got in the right format which saves time later. So I selected that and then you can pick the question type. You can pick how many questions and complexity I'll just do, I don't know, four, five here, six here. And then you can generate the quiz.

And I've found it really good in the sense that it generated a quiz instantly. And what would have taken me quite a long time to write all these multiple choice questions or fill the gap type questions. Gemini did for me - sorry, the VLE did for me. And then you can actually go down and just check them to make sure everything looks right and click the questions that you want. And when you do that, you can then add it to the assessment and create the create the assessment. So essentially that's what I did. And then when you go into it you can you can put - Mine was a formative quiz. So I can talk about how many go on to these settings and just check the check the particular settings they wanted the students to do. So I didn't have a due date. I allowed them to have as many attempts as possible. And just tweaked the marking a little bit, but I could check how many Obviously, you know, the way you can with the normal quiz - see who's been engaging with this.

But the beauty of it was the time that it really has saved me, and probably I wouldn't have been able to create kind of in time for the students arriving such a vast array of, of resources. Um, and students are using the quizzes. So that's, that's obviously the, the best thing from it. Never mind my time, my time being saved. I can see that students are using it and it feels quite versatile. So you can have lots of different types of questions. Um, you know, give, give definitions. Write a critical paragraph. There's there's various things you can do. Um, but yeah. So it really, really has saved me time in terms of my preparation and I think help the student experience. So that was all I was short and sweet, but I wanted to share it because it was a bit of a revelation for me. I might be teaching people things they already know, but I found it. I personally found it really helpful.