Make Your Content Pop: 3 AI Design Tips for Educators

Over the years you’ve undoubtedly built up a lot of great content: activities, slide decks, language explanations, practice worksheets, and more. Unfortunately, you may have found that despite your hard work and hours put into building quality, vetted content, your students just aren’t getting into it. What if I were to tell you that it’s not the content that’s stopping students from engaging—it’s the design?

Further, what if I were to tell you that you can easily make your work much more attractive and engaging with modern AI? With just a few simple strategies, you can make your content more engaging—no design skills required. I’ll show you how.

Why Design Is Important

Before we start, we have to make a concession to ourselves. Most of us don’t have graphic design backgrounds, and many of us may have come up in an education system that didn’t allow our own teachers to do much that was aesthetically pleasing. It’s easy to slide into the trap of thinking that “it’s content that’s important, the rest will sort itself out.” But the truth is, our current generation of students have grown up with a standard of design expectation that’s a world away from what many of their teachers are providing them. For example, think of how perfectly Apple designs things, even down to the tactile sensation of opening a box for the first time. Think of how websites are designed to draw your attention to the right place at the right time.

The list goes on and on, and these design choices aren’t accidents. Companies and organizations regularly spend more time and resources ensuring that the “look” of their products is appealing—often more than they spend on ensuring the quality of the product itself. In the marketing world, this is known as the perceived value theory, and our students, whether consciously or not, have a much higher level of expectation in everything they interact with because it’s the standard in the world they grew up in. In other words, if students see a well designed textbook, worksheet, or LMS page, they will hold it in higher regard, assume that it has stronger academic value, and be more likely to spend time engaging with it.

Design for the Nondesigner

“I get it,” you say, “but I’m not a designer.” Don’t worry—you don’t have to be, anymore. Enter artificial intelligence.

Even if you don’t trust the quality of content AI creates, it’s very easy to see whether you like how something looks, and whether it seems appealing and readable. I’m currently in the process of building an open educational resource, allowing me to draw on others’ freely available content and remix it in a way that works for my students. Since I’m working on grammar content, I found some excellent resources built by other teachers, but that don’t look the way that I’d like them to look for my students.

To be clear, content like this gets the job done, and I chose it because I like the quality, but I’m not convinced that it will grab my students’ attention. Instead, I gave it a run through AI, and with a quick cut-and-paste I ended up with this:

While I made a few small additions, you can see that at the core it’s mostly just a redesign; the same content is presented in a better way. Just like wrapping medicine in candy makes it more palatable for kids, so does wrapping good content in a better design make learning more palatable for students.

If you’re on board, let’s look at a few ways we can use AI to make things look better.

1. Tables

Tables are a great way to break down information into recognizable chunks that let us understand patterns and choices in language building. Even if you already have your content put into tables on a PDF or printed on some old worksheets, try uploading it to a chatbot and asking it to make it more design friendly. Many of these chatbots, without even asking, will do a good job of bolding keywords, color-coding important ideas, rearranging for coherency, and more.

Try a prompt like the following, then fine tune it to make it hit your exact needs:

I am uploading a document that explains [XYZ]. Please convert it into an HTML table that I can cut and paste into [Canvas / Blackboard / etc.]. Make sure the design is clean and aesthetically pleasing for viewers.

Most chatbots will let you see the product immediately and either cut and paste the html directly, or download it to upload into your LMS. Note that I included a place for the LMS name, as it will often customize the output to match the quirks of different systems.

2. Chunking

As soon as a student sees that there’s going to be three to four pages of scrolling to read something you’ve provided them, you may as well just ask them to climb Mt. Everest. Yes, of course we should help build students’ capacity for longer form reading, but many times what we’re asking students to do serves them better in consumable chunks.

Many of us still have analog brains, so it makes sense to us to make content that fits on about the size of a piece of paper. But humans largely moved away from scrolls a long time ago, and while the digital era largely brought the idea of endless “scrolling” back to maximize time on a “page,” few of us think in the opposite way and look at how we can minimize time on a page to increase the likelihood of students reading what we’ve given them.

Try a variation of the following prompt to play with breaking down the reading:

I’d like my students to read the attached passage. In order to make it easier for students to stay focused, please break it up into consumable chunks that can either be spread across multiple pages in [Canvas / Blackboard / etc.] or in text-carousels, accordion drop-downs, or other ways that make sense for interaction. BE CAREFUL not to change any of the original text. Your job is only to format it in a way that makes it easier to complete the reading.

Feel free to experiment with different styles and check what your students respond to. You may even find that in chatting with the AI, it can give you different suggestions on how to break up the reading for comprehensibility.

3. Accessibility

One area a lot of teachers have struggled with is in converting their content to be accessible to all students. Making sure that things not only look good, but can be read by screen-readers or other tech to help students with special needs can be a heavy lift and may discourage some teachers from converting documents from paper to digital. Trying to make the pages look good on top of that can dissuade them completely. These are exactly the kinds of situations where AI can come in to save the day. Think about your needs and you can have them ready to go every time you’re creating content for your students.

Everybody’s needs will vary, but consider the following prompt as a starting point:

Please convert the following into an HTML page that I can upload into [Canvas / Blackboard / etc.]. Our school’s primary colors are hex code [#004789] and [#C7CACE]. Prioritize the use of our school’s colors where possible.  Make sure the aesthetic is clean and stylish for a modern audience. Use clear, contrasting colors where appropriate, and make sure that the HTML is accessible and screen-reader friendly for students with accessibility needs.

Remember that as the chatbot creates a design, you can always ask it to fine-tune changes that don’t match your needs.

Bonus!

Not planning to upload your content to an LMS or website? No problem! You can still have your chatbot design in HTML, then download the file and convert it to PDF with any number of free sites (e.g., HTMLtoPDF). You can also add in some language asking the AI to design in color or in grayscale that will print well on your photocopier.

Design is an area that many don’t think of as a “tech” issue, but the two could not be more entwined. I’ve found that spending a little time trying to make a better design has more than paid itself off by increasing student time on task, reducing confusion, and engaging students in their learning process. With a couple of quick cut-and-pastes, you’ll be on your way to presenting your information in a way that resonates with students in the modern day.