Designing courses with an AI assistant

Jeremy Caplan of CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism shares how AI helps him refine a syllabus, structure a class session, and design an activity

AI is “expanding and augmenting the range of possibilities I consider as a teacher,” shares

Jeremy Caplan

, Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Whether he is teaching entrepreneurial journalism or training professors on pedagogy, Jeremy finds “AI helps me generate many more possible approaches to the teaching I am doing.”

By using AI as his assistant, he not only comes up with new ideas for how and what to teach, he’s also reclaiming his time. “New workflows allow me to reallocate time I would have spent on menial aspects of planning to actually speaking with students one-on-one or in groups,” he says. “That brings me a little closer to those students.”

Jeremy uses AI as a thought partner at every stage of course development, from setting the learning objectives for the semester to brainstorming interactive activities for an individual lesson.

Let’s take a look at how Jeremy prompts ChatGPT to help him refine a syllabus, structure a class session, and design an activity.

Refining a syllabus

When envisioning the overall learning objectives and syllabus for a course, Jeremy starts by focusing on three core elements, with an RIL acronym:

• R: Articulate the relevancy, relatability, and rationale for what you’re teaching

• I: Get ideas for how to make the syllabus more inspiring

• L: Craft learning outcomes that are precise and measurable, so it’s easier for students to understand if they have made progress

For example, in his Startup Sprint course for journalism students, Jeremy wanted to keep strengthening the syllabus to be supportive, useful, and relatable for students at multiple levels.

So he uploaded his syllabus to ChatGPT and gave it the following prompt:

Act as an experienced pedagogy expert and a thoughtful educator. Please analyze this syllabus carefully, taking on the perspective initially of a first-time student in this course and then of an experienced educator. 

Your analysis should cover several specific areas of consideration. For each section of your response, please be thorough but concise, focusing on actionable feedback. Here's the syllabus: {attach syllabus or paste it in}

Please provide:

1. First Impressions & Questions (Student Perspective)
•Imagine you're a student seeing this syllabus for the first time
•Create a numbered list of questions that might arise
•Focus particularly on areas that might cause confusion or anxiety
•Include questions about workload, grading, and expectations

2. Content Gaps Analysis
•Create a bulleted list of information that might be missing
•Identify areas that could benefit from more detail
•Note any policies or expectations that need clarification
•Flag any terms or concepts that might need definition

3. Suggested Additional Sections
•List specific sections that could enhance the syllabus
•For each suggestion, provide a brief (1-2 sentence) rationale
•Consider both standard sections (e.g., academic integrity) and innovative additions
•Focus on sections that would meaningfully support student success

4. Visual Enhancement Opportunities
•Suggest specific places where visuals could improve understanding
•Recommend types of graphics that could clarify course structure
•Propose visual elements to highlight key information
•Consider course-specific imagery that could engage students

5. General Improvement Ideas
•Provide concrete suggestions for overall enhancement
•Consider structure, organization, and flow
•Suggest ways to make key information more prominent
•Include ideas for making the syllabus more engaging and student-friendly

Please maintain a constructive tone throughout your analysis, balancing identification of areas for improvement with recognition of existing strengths. Focus on practical, implementable suggestions rather than theoretical improvements.

And here’s an example of the kind of feedback he got from ChatGPT on how he could refine his syllabus:

Structuring a class session

Jeremy thinks of planning a 3-hour lesson the way a playwright might construct a play, with different acts and scenes and rhythms: “We don't want to be doing any one thing all the time. We certainly don't want to be lecturing for three hours. We don't want to be just discussing for three hours. We don't want to be sitting in our chairs for three hours.” So with the help of an AI assistant, Jeremy brainstorms formats to consider.

Jeremy has the time to go to a level of depth in his lesson plan that may not otherwise have been possible.

Here’s his prompt asking for assistance with a 170-minute class session for his Startup Sprint course:

Act as an experienced lesson planning expert with extensive experience teaching and designing effective lesson plans based on a contemporary understanding of how students learn and the characteristics of effective, engaging, active learning. 

Create a table outlining a detailed lesson plan for a 170-minute class session for my "Startup Sprint" entrepreneurial journalism graduate student class. This particular class session is focused on guiding students toward making effective presentations. The session content is based partly on the attached "Polished Presenting" PDF handout. 

This session should include a brief icebreaker activity, followed by a short presentation from me, the instructor, to underscore a few of the key ideas in the Polished Presenting handout, which I'll provide to students. Then there should be a series of engaging activities to help students practice and strengthen their skills while learning the key session concepts as outlined in the handout. 

• The session should include time for a variety of practice activities, as well as a 15-minute break in the middle of class. There should be some time at the end of the class for synthesis, so please suggest a few possible games and reflection questions, and include a few minutes at the end for looking ahead to the next class session and reminders about the upcoming deliverables. 

• Include 2 potential titles for each section of the class session. Include also a time estimate. Include 2 possible lines I could use to introduce that part of class in an interesting way. Because oftentimes how we start something influences how it develops and we can get people excited with the first introduction line. 

• Include a funny comment or a pun or an excerpt from a poem to quote to begin or end each section of class. 

• Include 2 likely questions students might have about what we're about to do that I can preemptively answer.

ChatGPT output the lesson plan into a timetable, including a funny comment or quote to begin each section of the class, as well as likely student questions he may get asked — and preemptive answers:

Designing an activity

Jeremy collaborates with ChatGPT to prepare for each detail of an individual activity. “I like tasking AI to help me construct five different options for a particular lesson,” he says, and he finds it pushes his thinking in directions he may not have gone, because he specifically directs ChatGPT to be unconventional, surprising, and creative.

For example, for one hour of a three-hour class session in his Startup Sprint course, Jeremy drafted prompts to get a flurry of activity ideas.

His prompt:

Generate 5 unconventional, surprising, creative activities for a 60-minute grad journalism workshop on presentation skills. Activities should help students: 
• Practice 30-sec venture pitches
• Master calming breathing techniques
• Give paired peer feedback 
• Apply our presentation principles (eye contact, charisma, gentle hands, planted feet, simple slides, clear start/end)

Focus on surprising approaches that reinforce these principles while building students' confidence.

Here is one of the five ideas it generated:

See all of these prompts, along with links to example ChatGPT chats from Jeremy, here.

Two Tips

• Try reverse interviewing as a starting point

  
  If you haven’t yet drafted your syllabus or find yourself drawing a blank on what activity to do in class, try a reverse interviewing technique where you ask the AI to ask you questions. This prompting method reassures educators “who want to make sure that they're using their own ideas, thoughts, experiences, intelligence, and expertise — because it's interviewing them, it's drawing them out, and it's acting as a facilitator.”

• Create a Project for each of your courses

  
  Jeremy uses Projects, which allows you to to organize and customize a series of related chats, to give ChatGPT all the context for a given class. The feature allows you to “mine your own rich history of material,” he says, by uploading past lesson plans, notes, handouts, transcripts, and syllabi as context.

What questions do you have for Jeremy?

Jeremy Caplan is the Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, dedicated to preparing the next generation of journalists for a dramatically evolving field. He also writes a newsletter, Wonder Tools, to help people discover the most useful sites, apps, and services for working more creatively and efficiently. In an earlier life, he wrote for Time Magazine, and was a professional violinist. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Substack.

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