Welcome to Day 11! Today we’ll be exploring asynchronous collaboration and AI, through built-in tools that claim to support collaborative working and streamline specific tasks for groups of people working together in online asynchronous spaces. 

Today’s activity is written by Roshni Bhagotra (Senior Digital Learning Coordinator) and Hannah Hyde (Digital Learning Engagement Coordinator).

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A collaborative mindset in teaching, learning and management can be a powerful way of working with colleagues and/or students in educational or creative scenarios. Many online collaboration- focused platforms and tools now have AI- powered features aiming to further enhance our potential in working together online asynchronously. Collaboration platforms such as Miro, ClickUp, Notion and Trello have varied built- in AI to power various aspects of usability for the tool and workflows. 

Regularly used conference software’s such as MS teams and Zoom also have built- in AI features. You can integrate Teams with Microsoft Copilot, which provides a chatbot option, so you can easily message the Copilot AI, and an ‘intelligent call recap’ option. Zoom has options to integrate an ‘AI companion’ focused on streamlining communications, productivity and engagement. Some of these options are currently available on paid plans, depending on your institutional licence.  This can diversify the experience for those collaborating in real time, experiencing different ways of collaborating with different features. This can be useful to use in educational workshops or sessions to support asynchronous collaboration in hybrid spaces. 

A customisable and tailored workflow seems to be at the core of many of these collaborative platforms, presenting a way to streamline organisation and administrative tasks. AI has potential to create a diverse range of content and prompts to support or initiate collaborative processes, (as we explored in Day 3 with AI and mind maps); however, is that the core of using AI- powered asynchronous collaboration tools with students? Is asynchronous collaboration focused on workflow? Does AI built into collaboration tools offer other solutions to working asynchronously online in education?  

Miro & AI

In today’s activity, we’ll be using Miro. Miro is an online collaborative visual workspace designed to distribute remote and asynchronous working and communications. Miro can be used to create collaborative online boards for diagramming, wireframing, workshops, project management and data visualisation. 

Miro has built-in AI features on each board where you can generate content for digital sticky notes, longer documents, images or workflow diagrams. 

In these examples below, we explore each of the AI-generation options in Miro:  

Sticky notes  

We asked Miro AI to ‘generate a note explaining AI’s role in collaboration’. The result was a short but descriptive paragraph focused on the streamlining of tools. This could be useful for generating quick but specific descriptive points surrounding a topic for a mind map or brainstorming session, used whilst planning teaching.  

Documents 

We asked Miro AI to ‘generate a document about concerns surrounding using AI in collaborative practices’. A longer text was generated, highlighting key points and introduction and strategies for mitigation. This could be a useful project planning tool in an educational scenario or a creative one where the prompt is guided by a creative process or subject matter. 

Images

When asking Miro AI to ‘generate a creative response to the present conversation surrounding using AI with collaborative practices’ a rather literal image was generated where two robots were shown connected at the shoulder as part of one robot.

We tried another prompt asking Miro AI to ‘generate an image that reflects asynchronous collaboration and AI’, and a much more abstract image was created. This could be useful for generating accompanying visuals for educational materials or scenarios. Or for creating a vision/mood or colour palette board in brainstorming and workshopping. 

Diagrams

We asked Miro AI to ‘generate a flow chart exploring asynchronous collaboration and AI’, and the result was a straightforward and linear flowchart. This could be useful for plotting out early planning stages for different educational activities or it could be useful for planning or pre-empting project– specific actions within a timeframe.

Activity

Using Miro, create an account. UAL staff and students should use their UAL Miro accounts. If you haven’t requested a Free Education account prior, you can do so with these instructions from the Digital Learning Support blog. This may take a few days to be approved, so you may want to sign up for a separate account in the mean time. 

Note: If you are using Miro through an Enterprise license, you need to be an admin of a team. If you have created your own account, you should be able to access it. If you’re having issues, post in the Help and Support channel in Teams. You might also want to consult Miro’s guidance.

Miro privacy policy and data usage 

Each plan will have credits included to use AI. Free plans have 10 credits shared for the team each month.

The input data submitted through Miro AI are used solely to generate a response from the AI model and provide that response back to the user. The input data submitted are not used for model training, and content and usage data will be used according to Miro’s Privacy Policy.

Discussion 

Join us in the Teams space to share your AI-generated media and reflections. If you don’t have access to the space, email us at teachingexchange@arts.ac.uk for the attention of Hannah.

• Did you find the AI collaboration tools were useful in learning more about AI and collaboration? 
• Are there any educational use cases you could see this being helpful in? 
• Have you used collaborative AI tools with colleagues or students?
• How do you think AI can support or hinder collaboration in a creative process?