I have developed and sustained innovative practices in the use of generative AI to enhance learning design. This work was initially inspired by my participation in the University of Melbourne’s 2024 Teaching and Learning Summit, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Higher Education, and first put into practice later that year when I applied generative AI tools to support the development of teaching and learning materials for the Doctor of Clinical Dentistry program at Melbourne Dental School. That early experimentation established a rigorous, pedagogically grounded approach to AI-assisted design that now continues and has matured in my role at Melbourne Online through the use of the University of Melbourne’s SparkAI platform.
At Melbourne Online, I utilise SparkAI as an integrated design partner across complex and technically demanding subjects. I use Spark’s Projects feature to organise work into topic-based chat threads, enabling iterative refinement of materials while maintaining clarity, continuity, and version control. I prompt Spark with large, dense inputs – including lecture slides, transcripts, and published material – to rapidly synthesise content that would otherwise be impractical to process manually, supporting effective collaboration with subject matter experts.
SparkAI is embedded into my workflow for structuring LMS pages from SME-approved content maps and generating LMS copy aligned with editorial standards, significantly reducing downstream editing time. In technically complex subjects, Spark assists by:
- identifying appropriate uses of LaTeX notation to clarify mathematical concepts,
- generating and explaining Python code examples,
- proposing illustrative examples, visualisations, and interactive activities.
Across subjects, SparkAI enables me to focus less on mechanical production and more on pedagogical design, coherence, and learner experience.
Leigh has worked on several complex subjects, such as AI Planning for Autonomy and Security, Privacy and Ethics.
In these subjects he navigated unstructured, content-heavy material and created learning resources by sorting through multiple sources and extracting and consolidating into a design information from lengthy lecture recordings using SparkAI and other AI tools.
MO Senior Learning Designer
February 2026