The online learning platform Coursera has announced several new generative AI-powered features aimed at helping Malaysian universities in a time when AI has become the latest trend in town. These new educational tools will not only help our local tertiary education institutions grade students and enhance learning but also strengthen academic integrity, especially as generative AI poses both new challenges and opportunities.
Part of Coursera’s new features then includes ways to scale up the creation and grading of tasks and assessments handed out to students. This involves their new AI assessment generator, which Coursera claims will reduce educators’ time in creating math, text and multiple-choice assessments for various courses. Coursera will also allow teachers to produce a wider variety of questions for more robust testing, making it harder to predict exams. AI-assisted grading meanwhile will help teachers analyse student assignments, while still giving the grader the final decision on how to grade students.
On top of that, to circumvent the risk of students using generative AI tools to complete assignments, Coursera is also introducing features aimed at strengthening academic integrity. These includes graded item locking which will have students complete all of their ungraded assignments, readings, videos and other learning tools without being able to skip ahead. There will be time and attempt limits too, aimed at controlling exam attempts to encourage fair and meaningful learning and discourages students from trial and error methods. Proctoring and lockdown browser meanwhile ensures exam integrity by blocked any unauthorised resources or assistance during exams, while plagiarism detection will be able to help teachers identify content that’s similar to previous submission to deter plagiarism.
Lastly, Coursera also has new features to enhance learning and evaluation such as a the Coursera Coach, which gives students a personalised, generative AI-powered tutor grounded in expert Coursera content for interactive learning assistance, lecture summaries, guided practice and tailored pre-assessment reviews. There will also be AI-powered peer reviews for better feedback on text-based submissions, as well as an AI-based Viva Exam that can analyse free form written submissions and grading criteria to generate follow up questions for educators to better test the authenticity and critical thinking skills of the student’s submissions.
“We’re excited to empower Malaysian universities with new tools to uphold the highest standards of academic integrity in online learning, ensuring students receive an authentic and verified education that is respected by employers.
By prioritizing Malaysia as a key market for the launch, we are advancing the country’s vision for scaling high-quality online education and making digital and AI skills accessible to everyone,” – Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO
Wawasan Open University in Penang is among the Malaysian universities who have partnered with Coursera. The university, whose students are mostly working adults under 40, has already incorporated content from Coursera into some of their courses, with up to 50% integration in some. This partnership has allowed WOU to access content from industry leaders like IBM, Google and Meta in helping their students upskill and reskill, while also keeping their curricula aligned with evolving industry trends.
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