Easing Into the AI Discussion

One of the opportunities to improve accessibility with little downside

So many great food and cocktail options. I feel like I should have ‘warmed up’ at home before heading to New Orleans for Ellucian Live, but I’ll report on that in a future post (the conference, not the Sazerac selections).

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On to the update.

I’ve avoided wading into the AI in education discussions, partially as a way to digest the significance of recent developments, and partially due to coverage of federal regulatory changes. With all of the discussion of AI is clearly bad for education and AI is good for education, I wanted to share one personal example of how AI can benefit education, at least if used incrementally.

One of the pressures on higher education institutions (and vendors) is to improve the accessibility of web-based content. One of the key issues is to provide text-to-audio versions for students that have limited vision or even limited ability to sit in front of a screen. A while ago I thought it would be interesting to apply to the same concept to blogging, to give different options for readers / listeners and to provide a better first-hand understanding of what faculty and instructional designers face.

I tried to use several built-in web readers, including Apple’s VoiceOver, but I quickly learned this would be analogous to learning a new programming language. That might work for some people, but I didn’t have the time.

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