Any lesson or course cannot be complete without reinforcement and evaluation through questions. Assessment and knowledge check questions are integral to a successful learning experience. And yet, there is no denying that creating simple level-1 questions for knowledge checks and assessments is an unwieldy task. It puts a huge drag on the valuable time of educators, instructional designers and subject-matter experts. Question creation seems to be one of those eternal problems to which you can never find a satisfactory solution.
Outsourcing doesn’t always help
A lot of course creators and curriculum leads prefer outsourcing the tedious task of question creation, to save time and effort. For sure, it saves some efforts in the design process. But this is hardly a sustainable solution. Here’s why.
External consultants often lack the knowledge and expertise that your in-house experts possess. Naturally, the quality of the outsourced questions tends to be a bit suspect. This means that the efforts you managed to save in the design phase usually have to be put into the review cycle instead. This has two consequences: the cost implications of this two-pass process are significant, and delays are inevitable with dual dependencies on external consultants and in-house experts.
Can technology provide a way out?
Some believe that technology can come to our rescue for simplifying the question creation process. There seems to be some chatter about using automatic question generators as a solution to this common learning bottleneck. Here’s how it would work: We would use Artificial Intelligence to process a large amount of content, and basically let a software create questions for us on a single click.
With Natural Language Processing (NLP), machines can understand language at a morphosyntactic level—what that means is, it can tell parts of speech such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so forth. NLP even makes it possible to determine some meaningful relationships between independent words. So, with NLP you can tell which noun an adjective refers. But, question generation is more than just a function of grammar and syntax. To create good questions, you need to look at words in their context and understand their semantic significance—examining words in isolation will not work. This is where the current technology falls short, and this is where automatic question generators need a helping hand.
How about a confluence of artificial intelligence and human intelligence?
Clearly, the current technology isn’t a satisfactory solution to the question-creation conundrum. A purely AI platform, without any human intervention, will fail to deliver. A human-only solution isn’t sustainable either, as the time investment is unreasonably high. Both alternatives miss the mark when it comes to the fine balance between the time-and-efforts and the quality of questions.
But neither of these two solutions—an AI platform or human involvement—is without its advantages. Artificial Intelligence promises efficiency, while human intelligence preserves the context and the instructional value of the questions. What if there was a way to bring together the best of both alternatives to create a third, more robust solution?
Using AI would bring down the time it takes to create a set of questions from hours to, quite literally, a few seconds. The questions may not be perfect, but that’s where the human intervention comes in. This AI platform would need to be backed by a human element—an educator or an instructional designer, someone who understands the intricacies and nuances of question creation. This human in the loop can review and curate AI-generated questions to craft the best possible questions on the content.
Sounds promising, right? Well, that’s exactly what Quillionz is. It is the world’s first AI-powered question generator that enables you to create quality assessment questions for your courses in a fraction of the time it takes you today. Here’s how it works: You upload your content to the Quillionz platform. Once you do, Quillionz’ powerful algorithms automatically create ideas based on your content, which you can then curate and publish. Quillionz finds the perfect synergy between human expertise and technology to make your question-creation process faster and more efficient. Click here for a free sign-up with Quillionz and delve into this new approach to question-creation.
Good article.