Our New Course: Some Highlights

My colleague and I spent ten crazy days making an MultiModal AI Composition II course. Here are some highlights of what we did.

First some data:

• 10 days of work researching, writing, and proofing

• 126 LMS Pages (112 pages completely new material)

• 25 Graded Assignments

• 10 rubrics

• Alignment for grading, syllabus, dates, and course schedules

• Over 100 original AI-Generated images

Eugenia Novokshanova and I have been busy, to say the least. We worked day and night (literally), collaborating, bouncing ideas off of one another, editing, revising, and reworking this class, and, finally, we have it done.

On Monday, we will present this brand new multi-modal AI Composition II course to the most difficult audience of all: our students. We think we are ready, but there are always small adjustments, changes, reviews, and revisions that will come in the days, weeks, and months ahead. It is a pilot course, for sure, but it is done.

Last summer, we spent weeks and weeks redoing our Composition I course to be multimodal and AI, so when we approached the end of this semester, we looked at each other and said, “We have to be ready with a Composition II course for these students!”

We started talking about this course at the end of the fall semester, in mid-December, playing with concepts and trying to figure out how we should approach the course. It wasn’t until December 24th that we started working on it.

So, what’s in the course? Well, we started with a theory, taken from Gerald Graff in his 1993 work Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. Graff’s premise is that our students are constantly taught as if ideas are dead, static things that have already been decided long before they came along. But, when you teach the conflicts—what a conflict is, it’s history, and the major voices of a conflict—the students have entre into the conversations that shape their world.

We wanted to create a class where students took a sustained idea about a conflict in their area of interest and built upon it, researched it, found out as much as they could about it, reported on it, and then, finally, when they knew all they could, took a stand and made an informed argument. Along the way, we wanted them to learn about multimodal writing and AI and employ those tools to bring their research project to life.

We start with an AI playground—a full week of AI activities where students learn about tools and play with them. Then, we move into rhetoric and exigence. What causes you to want to write about something? How do you recognize an issue that might be controversial?

As they start to think about conflicts that they are interested in researching, we introduce them to AI tools for research, like Perplexity, SciSpace, and You. We ask them to look into the topics they might be interested in and make a research proposal. Then they learn Zotero and make an AI-assisted annotated bibliography.

As they move into the next week, they create a literature map to plan the next two sections of their paper with Miro. Then we teach them how to translate that literature map into two short, evidence-based research papers about the context and background of a conflict and the major voices in the conflict.

As they begin to write, they learn how to integrate quotations and facts. They locate and generate images and infographics, and they locate videos. Their paper can’t just be words—it must integrate at least three rhetorical images. In addition, each section of the paper must have at least four reflective footnotes, explaining the choices they made as they wrote and how they felt about those choices.

Each short paper goes through a “tutorial” AI that helps direct them as they write. Here’s the prompt:

I would like assistance as an AI writing tutor. When I provide an essay, please use your advanced natural language processing capabilities to analyze and offer feedback on areas of improvement. Do not rewrite or revise my paper. Only offer suggestions. Your recommendations should be rooted in proven writing techniques and effective rhetorical practices. To begin, prompt me with: "Please paste your essay below." After providing feedback on an essay, please invite me to share another by saying, "Feel free to paste your next essay below."

Then, when they are done with the revision of the paper with AI, they put it through a grammar and spell checker prompt in AI:

You are a copy editor. You are tasked with improving the punctuation and grammar of the following writing sample with minimal changes in wording. When you are done, please give me a list of the punctuation and grammar you fixed in a bullet list. Here is the writing: [Insert writing here].

Finally, they submit the draft to their peers for response. When both papers are as good as they can get, they combine the research proposal, the “Context and Background,” and the “Voices of the Conflict” papers together, complete revisions, add multimodal elements and footnotes, and complete the 10-15-page investigative report with a Works Cited page done with Zotero.

At the end of that paper, they recompose their project into an ignite presentation, 5-minute documentary, or 5-minute podcast using some great AI tools like Descript and Riverside FM. These tools have great AI that removes “ums” and “ahs” and dead air automatically; they allow easy editing; and they can even copy your voice using HeyGen technology to fill in where you might have left something out.

Finally, when they thoroughly understand the conflict, they are ready to take a stand. In the last project of the class, they use AI to perfect a claim and outline a 6-point Toulmin argument. They write that argumentative paper, finally participating in the ongoing academic argument as a full participant.

They then put the investigative report and argument paper on a Wix website that includes their presentation, documentary, or podcast, as well as their images and videos, as each section is recomposed for a web audience.

Along the way, we tried to keep the projects fun and exciting. We want our students to have experience delving deeply into a prolonged project, understand how AI tools can be used ethically along the way, and have a full understanding of the power of multimodal communication. We are hoping our students will get a lot out of this course, but we won’t know until we run it!