LMSystemsHow to build adaptive homework from your lecture notes
A step-by-step guide for college instructors: turn one week of lecture notes or slides into an adaptive assignment that AI grades, with follow-up questions on the ideas each student missed.
Adaptive homework asks a student more about what they missed, and less about what they already know. McGraw Hill's SmartBook does this with the chapters of its own textbook. This guide does it with your own lecture. It takes one week of material and ends with an assignment your students can open.
You need an LMSystems account (free to start) and the notes or slides from one lecture.
1. Start with one week of material
Pick one lecture you already teach. Make a course, and upload that week's notes, slides and readings on its Files page. PDF, Word and PowerPoint files all work. AI labels each file, so you can find it again, and the quiz builder's assistant reads the course's files when it writes questions. Students never see these files.
One week is enough to start. You can see how your students answer before you build the next one.
2. Ask for questions that test one idea each
Make a new quiz in the course, and tell the assistant what you want. Be specific about the lecture and the kind of question:
Write five short-answer questions from Lecture 7. Each question should test one idea from the lecture. For each one, give a correct answer that lists the ideas a full answer needs.
One idea per question matters for adaptive homework. When an answer is half right, the follow-up asks about the half that was missed. A question that tests one idea gets a clear follow-up. A question that tests five ideas gets a follow-up that is hard to aim.
The assistant can also check facts in open textbooks and academic papers as it writes, at no extra cost. Its Fast mode is free; the Smart mode, for harder requests, uses credits.
3. Write each answer key as a list of ideas
The AI grader reads each student's answer against your correct answer and rubric. It finds the ideas the answer covered and the ones it missed, and the follow-up is written from that list. So the clearer the ideas in your answer key, the better aimed the follow-up. Here is one from an intro biology lecture:
During cellular respiration, what does oxygen do, and what happens to the cell when oxygen runs out?
- Correct answer
- Oxygen is the final electron acceptor of the electron transport chain.
- Without oxygen, the chain stops and ATP output drops sharply.
- The cell switches to fermentation to keep making a little ATP.
- A half-right answer
- "Oxygen is the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain."
- A follow-up it could get
- A muscle cell runs low on oxygen during a sprint. What happens to its electron transport chain, and how does the cell keep making some ATP?
The answer and the follow-up above are examples we wrote for this post. In your course, AI writes each follow-up for the student who needs it, so no two are quite the same.
4. Review the draft
The assistant never changes your quiz on its own. Its changes wait for you to save them, so read each question before you do. Fix the wording, tighten an answer key, or delete a question you would not ask. You can add a rubric for the whole quiz or for one question, as text or as a table.
5. Turn on Adaptive quiz
Open the quiz's Settings tab and check Adaptive quiz. It needs AI grading, and grades each answer as it is turned in. Then choose when the follow-up is asked:
- Right away: the follow-up comes in the answer's feedback, before the student sees the grade. The grade is then for both answers together, and never lower than the first.
- At the end of the quiz: follow-ups come after your own questions. Choose how many follow-ups one question can get, and which AI writes them: Fast writes quickly, Smart aims more closely at what was missed.
Multiple choice, multi-select and blanks graded from your answer key never get follow-ups, because their grade does not name the ideas a student missed.
6. Preview it, then assign it
Preview the assignment as a student before you publish it. Then add a due date and publish. Students sign in from the link, or from their course page, on any device. Only the students in the course can open it.
7. Read what your students wrote
Each response shows every answer with its score and feedback. A follow-up sits under the question it follows, with its own answer key, the student's answer and how it was graded. Each question keeps one score: a follow-up can only add back what the first answer missed. You can change any grade, and the course's gradebook adds it all up.
Then look across the class. If many students missed the same idea, that is the place to start your next lecture.
What it costs
Each AI-graded answer takes 1 credit with Fast grading, the default. Each follow-up takes 2 credits to write (25 with the Smart AI), and its answer is graded like any other. Every new account gets 5,000 free credits that never expire. The example class on our home page works out a whole term.
If you use SmartBook now, our SmartBook comparison shows what changes for you and your students, and what stays elsewhere.