UC Professor Uses AI to Generate Course Materials in 20 Hours, Improving Efficiency, Reducing Burdens, and Turning a Profit

UCLA plans for 2025 the school'sA comparative literature course will have AI to generate textbooks, assignments, and provide a teaching assistant ready to explore issues.. Thanks to artificial intelligence, this course format and material will take on a whole new look in 2025.

"This new technology will immediately bring tangible benefits to me, teaching assistants - and more importantly - students. " - Prof. Stahulik

"Because this course is an overview of literature and culture, I want students to have a pulse on what they understand," said Stahulik, professor of comparative literature and European languages and intercultural studies.

"Typically, I would spend class time providing context for the material and using visuals to present the content. But now all of that is included in the materials we're writing with AI, theI can have more time to read primary sources with students and guide them on how to analyze and think critically."

With this AI-generated textbook.Professor Stahulik can focus on those aspects of teaching in his lectures, and TAs can accordingly get rid of those tasks and instead devote more time to helping students with their writing assignmentsThe platform can also help professors to ensure that course materials are coherent. In addition, the platform helps professors ensure that course material is coherent. Now that her instructional material is organized into a coherent text, another faculty member can lead the course during semesters when Stahurak is not teaching - and provide students with a very similar learning experience. Meanwhile.With AI-generated lesson plans and assisted writing exercises, students in each discussion group can be confident that the instruction they receive is comparable to that of other groupsThe

I. University of California's AI Textbook Generation Platform

Prof. Stakhuliak generates content based on an AI textbook generation platform called "Kudu". The platform was created by Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at the university, with the goal of making high-quality learning materials available to students for free or at a low cost.

The Kudu AI platform originally emerged as a tool for UCLA's science program.The platform was developed by Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, and his former Ph.D. student Warren Aisi. While Stahulik's course will be Kudu's debut in the humanities at UCLA, the system has already been used this quarter in a social sciences course taught by Professor Stefania Tutino and an introductory history course.

"Coming from the STEM field, I was surprised to see the extensive and sophisticated use of Kudu tools in the humanities," Cusenko said. "Now, however, I see that humanists are leading the way and taking Kudu in an exciting new direction."

II. Creating Courses with Kudu

In order to create this AI course, Prof. Stahuliak needed to provide the platform with all of her notes and lesson plans, PPTs, and videos on YouTube from previous times she took the course, as well as the papers and materials involved. In other words.This system helps the teacher to build up a knowledge base exclusive to this course, which contains the teacher's years of accumulation and hard work.The

The course creation process can take three to four months, however Kudu requires professors to spend up to 20 hours on material development, including review and editing, and the Kudu team pays them for that time.. The rest of the process was managed by the Kudu team, with the technical team providing all the back-end support to understand what the lecturers wanted to do with the material.

In addition, students can ask the AI assistant questions about the course at any time during the 24-hour period.The AI assistant for this course has its own specialty, which is that it bases its answers only on the material provided by the professor, not on searches from the Internet. This means that students can trust the AI assistant's answers more because it only conveys what the professor approves of and doesn't mislead them. This way there won't be too many doubts about the teacher enabling this AI assistant.

Prof. Stahulik already plans to use Kudu in other courses "This allows us more time to teach basic analytical skills, critical thinking, and reading skills in a consistent way-which is what professors do best." She said. "These things are hard to do when there are 300 students in a classroom, but with AI we can do them better!."

III. Kudu profit model and inspiration

The Kudu platform produces AI instructional materials that students can access for $25, a package that also includes AI tools.

Between 2022 and 2023, U.S. college students will spend about $1,172 a year on textbooks, equivalent to 8,800 yuan. In some cold majors, textbooks can be expensive, even if they are used. Most textbooks are estimated to cost more than $100, and sometimes many professors in class make a point of letting students buy the one they put out, which earns them a lot of royalties.

Kudu can help students save money on textbooks while providing better quality materials and services.The

Kudu model may not be in line with our national conditions, but the direction proposed in the article is that AI can play a big role at this stage. For example, a special teacher, their own years of lesson plans and teaching materials to form a knowledge base, then first of all, they will be very beneficial, looking for information examples will be much more convenient, and in addition, on this basis, there can be a special "seventh grade biology teacher Wang AI assistant", specialized in solving the learning problems for students after school. In addition.If this knowledge base can be turned into a public knowledge base, it means that even students and teachers in small tier 5 or 6 counties can have access to high-quality teaching resources, further alleviating the inequity of educational resourcesThe