In an exciting new project at Learning Design Solutions, we embarked on a journey to harness AI for designing a fully online, university-level course titled Principles of Responsible Management. This course, aimed at Master’s students, spanned four weeks and was structured for 5 UK academic credits (CAT points), equating to about 50 hours of student engagement. With AI at the core of the design process, we aimed not only to streamline the course development timeline but to uphold robust educational standards rooted in learning science and sound pedagogy. Here, I’d like to share some reflections on the process and what we learned along the way.

Post-pandemic and post-emergency remote learning, a lot of institutions are recognising that they can and should put some of their programmes online. Acceptance of online and the recognised need to provide alternative modes of learning have helped everyone see that a bigger presence in the online space is desirable if not inevitable, but does a university need an OPM partner to go online?

What is the purpose of a lecture? If students have constant access to rich resources on pretty much every subject we would want to teach, why should we spend time talking to them about that subject, rather than letting them investigate for themselves?

In this short article, I look at how we can ensure that our lectures add value - both in live teaching settings, and micro-lectures added to asynchronous online courses.