Instructional designers recognize the pattern immediately. The technology functions fine, but the learning feels flat. Students receive information, but they have fewer opportunities to wrestle with it, question it, or do something with it. The course becomes a delivery mechanism rather than a learning environment. There is no struggle in the process.
Here's a close look at four tools you can use right now — all with free tiers — and the upgraded experience you can offer students when they use them. Let's move beyond the digital lecture!
https://notebooklm.google.com/
Upload your course readings, lecture notes, and slide decks, and NotebookLM can summarize content, surface key concepts, and generate study guides within minutes. For faculty navigating a rapid transition to online teaching, that alone is a meaningful time saver.
The real opportunity comes when instructors treat those AI-generated outputs as the start of a learning activity rather than the end of lesson prep. NotebookLM can generate discussion prompts, case scenarios, and interpretation questions that move students from passive reading to active thinking.
Students encounter ideas through conversation and application. Faculty spend less time on course prep logistics and more time on what only they can provide: expertise, context, and judgment.
Paste text into Napkin AI and it generates visual frameworks — concept maps, process diagrams, flowcharts — that represent the relationships between ideas. Disciplines that rely on systems thinking (economics, biology, organizational theory, political science) find this especially valuable.
Here's the design insight: the deepest learning happens when students build the model, not when they receive one the instructor already made.
When students have to decide how to visually represent a system, they're reasoning about it — not just recalling facts. The diagram becomes evidence of understanding, not decoration.
Type a prompt into Gamma and receive a polished, structured slide deck or FAQ in seconds. For faculty who need to build an online lecture quickly, it's a genuine relief. A well-structured presentation that might take two hours to produce from scratch appears in under two minutes.
The sharper pedagogical move is to flip the tool toward students. Instead of building all the slides yourself, assign students to build short explanatory presentations on a concept from the week's material.
The slides become artifacts of student thinking, not just lecture notes. Teaching a concept to others remains one of the most reliable paths to understanding it yourself.
Genially lets instructors create interactive content — clickable graphics, layered information reveals, and branching pathways that respond to student choices. A lecture stops being a linear stream of information and becomes something students navigate.
With a shift in framing, Genially moves from “dynamic presentation tool” to “scenario engine.” Instead of presenting information, it can drop students into a situation they have to figure out.
Other disciplines can adapt this easily: a business class navigating a market disruption, a political science course inside a diplomatic negotiation, a social work course managing a complex case. The common thread is that students test ideas and see consequences, rather than read about them.
None of these tools transforms a course on its own. A bad assignment built in Gamma is still a bad assignment. A concept map generated without any student thinking is just a diagram.
The underlying principle is simpler than any specific tool: students learn more when they do something with ideas — interpret them, visualize them, explain them to others, or test them against a scenario. The challenge in online teaching has always been designing activities that create those moments... the process of learning.
Remember this: Design the process. Not just the end product.
Now you can quickly and easily design process-oriented activities in a virtual environment.
Used intentionally, these tools free up the time and cognitive overhead that course-building demands, so instructors can focus on what only they can provide: the judgment needed to design experiences that actually teach something.
Views expressed reflect general instructional design principles.
At Centreity, our mission is to empower university faculty and administrators to innovate and lead in higher education. We foster a collaborative, technology-enhanced learning environment that emphasizes practical, student-centered strategies.
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