🌐Overview

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes educational tools and content creation, OER project leaders face new possibilities and responsibilities. AI can be a strategic partner in content development. It also introduces challenges with content accuracy, bias, sustainability, and copyright. It is vital for OER project leaders to understand how to use AI responsibly and strategically. This section looks at how to integrate AI meaningfully and ethically into the OER development.

📖 Table of Contents

Policies and Strategic Integration
- Institutional and Team-Level Policies
- Planning Your AI Workflow
Optimizing OER Creation with AI Integration
- Content Creation and Enhancement
- Formatting and Accessibility
- Assessment Design
- Versioning and Curation

✔️ Policies and Strategic Integration

AI is increasingly important in OER workflows. It helps with drafting, formatting, translation, accessibility, and metadata tagging. As these tools grow, educators must balance innovation with a focus on quality and inclusion. Responsible AI use starts with clear policies that match institutional values and legal standards. These guidelines aim to prevent misuse. They also ensure transparency, accessibility, and fairness in all AI-based educational materials.

📌Institutional and Team-Level Policies

AI use must align with your institution’s academic integrity, copyright, and accessibility policies. At the project level, set shared expectations early. Develop team norms for what constitutes ethical AI usage and documentation practices.

Disclosure. Label any section or element substantially created or adapted with AI assistance. Also, clearly identify how AI was used in primarily human-generate content.
Human Oversight. Always pair AI generation with human review. This includes fact-checking, editing, and contextualizing. Doing so helps keep instructional quality high and ensures legal compliance.
Avoid Misuse. Clearly identify what uses of AI are permitted and not permitted for your project.
- Permitted uses may include: brainstorming outlines, generating alternative quiz formats, assisting with alt text creation, refining language, and extracting themes from readings
- Not Permitted uses may include: creating content directly, generating citations or data, rewriting copyrighted material, and entering student data into AI.

🛠️Toolkit: Add a section to your project charter that defines the specific AI tools permitted (e.g., ChatGPT 4.0, DALL·E 3), the tasks they can support, and any tool-specific caveats or limitations. You might also want to create an internal AI Policy Acknowledgement Form that contributors sign before receiving access to AI-enabled platforms or beginning content development.

The Guidelines for AI Usage in OER Projects document offers a helpful starter template.

The AI Checklist for OER Authors can help guide your project's responsible AI integrations.

📌 Planning Your AI Workflow

AI can aid in writing explanations, creating quiz questions, offering layout ideas, and translating materials. But as reliance on AI grows, we face a fundamental shift. When AI begins shaping voice, structure, and content decisions at scale, it moves from being a passive tool to an active co-author. This raises new operational and ethical questions

Who is responsible for fact-checking, bias mitigation, and accessibility compliance?
How do we verify statistically plausible content but potentially incorrect (hallucinated)?
What does authorship and attribution look like when the AI contributes 40–70% of the draft content?
How do we credit AI-generated material in a way that upholds academic integrity and transparency?

Key workflow steps

Define Purpose. Clarify when and why AI will be used: Drafting? Revising? Formatting?
Choose Tools Wisely. Select based on output format (text vs. visual), license terms, and transparency about training data.
Craft Strong Prompts. Use scaffolded prompts, such as "Write a 3-sentence objective for a community college-level course in Environmental Science focused on local water systems."
Track AI Use. To log AI-assisted content, use version-controlled folders, Google Docs comment histories, or an attribution tracker.
Review and Revise. Never rely on raw output. Edit and fact-check before sharing or publishing.

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✔️ Optimizing OER Creation with AI Integration

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in educational content creation, it’s important to understand where it adds value and where human oversight remains essential. AI can support a variety of activities in OER development

Planning. Generating draft outlines, reorganizing content sequences, and conducting audience analysis
Drafting. Writing content from prompts, adapting reading levels, and creating examples
Revising. Suggesting edits for clarity, summarizing large sections, and enhancing tone
Formatting. Structuring headings, simplifying tables, and checking visual layout
Accessibility. Alt text suggestions, detecting contrast issues, and creating plain language summaries
Translation. Offering multilingual drafts or vocabulary conversion (with careful human validation)

📌Content Creation and Enhancement

Drafting Content. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can create first drafts from prompts. They can also rewrite content to fit a certain tone or reading level. Additionally, they synthesize research into easy-to-understand explanations.
Adaptation. AI can adjust cultural references to be more inclusive and simplify tough academic terms. It can also reshape lessons to meet course goals, accessibility standards, or unique student needs.
Quiz and Prompt Generation. AI can quickly generate a variety of assessment types, including multiple-choice, short answer, and scenario-based questions, tailored to different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. These tools can also create prompts for peer review or discussion boards.
Interactive Learning. Notebook LM and ChatGPT help teachers create dynamic learning tools from their lecture materials or chosen sources. They can make AI-driven study guides, interactive timelines, or real-time simulations. This lets them guide students through concept reviews, hypothetical scenarios, or Socratic questioning. This makes abstract ideas clearer and more engaging.

📌 Formatting and Accessibility

Automated Formatting. Tools like Hemingway, Grammarly, and Microsoft CoPilot help improve clarity, conciseness, and tone consistency. They point out passive voice, complex sentences, and readability problems. This helps authors meet accessibility or institutional writing standards.
Accessibility. AI tools like PopeTech and Universal Access Bot check digital content. They find missing alt text, bad heading structures, and low color contrast. Some tools can suggest or auto-generate alt descriptions. They can also rewrite passages to align with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. This helps make materials more inclusive and accessible for all learners.

📌 Versioning and Curation

AI tools use natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision. They classify and label content. This makes it easier to find, organize, and personalize open educational resources. These tools:

Auto-tag and categorize content using context and key terms.
Improve searchability by linking user queries to metadata and content tags.
Enable personalized recommendations by matching user behavior to tagged content. This includes tools like YouTube’s AI engine, Netflix recommender systems, or Adobe Sensei.
Create metadata for OER at scale. This reduces manual effort and keeps content consistent across large libraries. Used by Libretexts Conductor AI tools
Version control. AI tools can look at many document drafts. They find changes, flag issues, and check if everything meets current standards. They can spot old references or broken links. This helps make timely updates for accuracy and relevance.

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📋Case Studies:

In "Love at First Byte," Liz Encarnacion from Chaffey College shows how communication faculty used AI to create a scaffolded OER for multilingual students. The faculty adjusted the tone and context to include culturally relevant metaphors.
Faculty in language instruction at CSU-Pueblo: Faculty used AI to co-develop a language OER with students. They built culturally responsive content and acknowledged AI in the credits. Their strategy combined student podcasting, AI tone adjustments, and IDEA-aligned edits.