The AI Design Assistant is designed to help academic staff generate activities and images based on their learning materials already present in Blackboard Courses (i.e. it cannot create the learning materials, for example presentations and lecture notes).
- How can the AI Design Assistant enhance your Blackboard experience?
- Does the AI Design Assistant create learning material (course content?)
- Do all courses use the Blackboard AI Design Assistant?
- How does the AI Design Assistant work?
- How secure is the AI Design Assistant?
- Trustworthy AI principles
How can the AI Design Assistant enhance your Blackboard experience?
- Visuals: It offers AI-generated, royalty-free images, making the Course visually engaging.
- Assessment: It generates ideas for formative assessments, rubrics and proposes questions that can be used in a quiz (e.g., multiple choice/multiple option questions) based on specific documents or existing parts of your Course that have been authored by your Module Convenor.
- Interactive Learning: It suggests ideas for discussions activities and journal instructions to help you learn. Your Module Convenor can set up interactive Role play and Socratic questioning conversations to help you reflect, practice using key terminology and improve your understanding of topics.
Does the AI Design Assistant create learning material (course content?)
Please note that the AI Design Assistant cannot create teaching and learning materials (i.e., course content, such as presentations and lecture notes) but it can be very helpful in creating activities to support teaching and learning (e.g., generating questions from specific course content items for knowledge checks). Due to the inherent limitations of AI, anything generated is carefully reviewed by your Module Convenor before being edited and/or approved for use in a course.
Do all courses use the Blackboard AI Design Assistant?
The AI Design Assistant only generates suggestions when requested by individual academic staff and cannot automatically add anything to Blackboard Courses. Any suggestions made by the AI Design Assistant can only be added to a Blackboard Course after being checked and approved by your Module Convenor.
How does it work?
The AI Design Assistant uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to generate suggestions that your Module Convenor could choose to include in your Course to enhance your learning experience. It can generate:
- Images
- Questions
- Ideas for Assignment, Discussion, and Journal activities
- Rubrics
- AI Conversations (interactive Role play and Socratic questioning)
How secure is the AI Design Assistant?
Blackboard and Microsoft OpenAI, do not claim copyright on the content generated by the AI Design Assistant. Content ownership is subject to the universities IMPs policies. Only limited Course information is shared with Microsoft for the Azure OpenAI Service. All data used and generated by the AI tools is stored in Blackboard’s database. However, prompts and outputs are reviewed by Microsoft for content filtering and stored for up to 30 days. Anthology uses this information to maintain and support the Blackboard AI tools, in accordance with applicable laws. Data inputs and outputs are not used to train language models.
Blackboard AI Design Assistant – Trustworthy AI principles
The lawful, ethical, and responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) is a key priority for Blackboard (and it’s parent company, ‘Anthology’); therefore, they have developed and implemented a Trustworthy AI program that has been reviewed by the university Technical Design Authority (TDA) and approved for use. The principle areas are:
- Fairness
- Reliability and accuracy
- Humans in control
- Transparency and Explainability
- Privacy, Security and Safety
- Value alignment
- Accountability
Where can I find out more about Generative AI at the University?
See the Essentials guide: Generative AI at university
Guide last updated on July 8, 2025