Build a Teaching Assistant via Word
Get started on creating your custom AI Teaching Assistant – without even leaving Word. This new approach offers an easy entry to an efficiency-enhancing assistant designed by UNE staff for our use.
The AI Assistant template provides a step-by-step process: you fill in the blanks, add relevant documents, and the pre-written prompt does the rest.
This innovative tool is designed to support academic staff with a wide range of tasks, from drafting learning outcomes and assessment briefs to generating rubrics, feedback comments, topic summaries, and unit communications. It aims to reduce the time spent on repetitive or administrative duties, allowing staff to focus more on teaching, mentoring, and student engagement.
Collaboration between pedagogy and AI expertise
"When Michelle reached out to collaborate on this, I jumped at the opportunity," explains Shannon Tyrrell, AI Innovation Lead at LabNext70. "It was a great example of how deep teaching knowledge and AI design can come together to solve real, everyday problems. With Michelle's pedagogical expertise and my background in prompting and assistant development, we were able to create something that's not just functional, but genuinely usable, even for staff who are new to AI."
Designed for accessibility and impact
The core innovation lies in its accessibility. "Shannon and I decided that a Word document was the easiest way to widely share this assistant to avoid the need to share the original assistant on Madgwick individually for each new user," says Michelle Edgely, Acting Associate Dean Teaching and Learning. "The Word doc contains a pasteable prompt with instructions, including very detailed numbered steps. Our idea is that the assistant could be picked up even by users who haven't experimented with AI yet. We want this to be really accessible.
"This approach empowers UNE academic staff to leverage a powerful AI tool for routine admin and lower-level drafting work. This frees up academics to do creative work and spend more face-to-face time engaging with students, teaching, supporting, encouraging, and mentoring.
Ready for testing
The assistant is grounded in UNE's context and sound pedagogical foundations, including constructive alignment, Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, and Universal Design for Learning. The template guides the AI by defining its role as a dedicated teaching assistant for a specific unit, outlining unit summaries, learning outcomes, assessment overviews, and preferred coaching styles.
"For me, this kind of project is what AI in education should be about: practical support that empowers staff," Shannon adds.
The team has shared the template with four volunteers and is currently awaiting their feedback. To try the assistant contact Michelle Edgely.