As students head back to class, a University of Calgary professor is out on a mission to change perspectives towards AI.
Soroush Sabbaghan, associate professor at the Werklund School of Education, has developed a tool called SMARTIE, which is anticipated to be a gamechanger in academia and help make it more inclusive and diverse.
SMARTIE is a suite of web-based applications, utilizing the power of artificial intelligence and allows educators to generate various course components such as outlines, learning activities, and reading lists.
“The app generates an inclusivity report saying that, for example, all your readings are from 2024, they are all from Canada, and they all are theoretical,” says Sabbaghan. “Now, for one course, that may be exactly what you want, but that’s probably not true for every single course.”
Students at UCalgary tell CityNews that having an AI designed inclusive curriculum could be helpful to provide more diverse reading lists due to its knowledge in databases.
Since making the SMARTIE tool freely available online at SMARTIE.dev, Sabbaghan has recorded more than 8,000 hits and the tool has been used to design the fall curriculum for many courses at UCalgary, including the Haskayne School of Business.
And now the University of Saskatchewan and Ambrose University are also encouraging faculty to use it.
“Different faculties use it differently because they have different needs,” says Sabbaghan. “For example, the Faculty of Engineering really likes that app that creates the report. Faculty of Social Work, they like the rubric generator and also the different variations within that.”
“Each faculty has a different set of needs.”
After presenting his research in June at Congress 2024, Canada’s largest humanities and social sciences conference, Sabbaghan now aims to develop a version of the SMARTIE tool suitable for K to 12 learning environments across Canada.