2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Democratizing Generative AI Quiz Creation: Accelerating Assessment Development in Engineering Education

Presented at Computers in Education Division (COED) Poster Session

Engineering educators face vexing technical barriers when leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) for assessment creation, leading to limited adoption of this transformative tool. This Work-in-Progress paper addresses the research question: "How can automated tooling reduce the technical complexity of implementing GenAI-powered assessment generation in engineering education while maintaining assessment quality?" The current process [1] requires educators to perform six distinct technical steps across multiple platforms, consuming 30-45 minutes per assessment to generate a quiz bank. This paper will show that consolidating these steps into a single automated workflow will significantly reduce implementation time while maintaining or improving assessment quality. The proposed system allows instructors to easily upload material, resulting in a new quiz that seamlessly appears in the list of quizzes for a specific course’s LMS. This streamlined approach not only accelerates assessment creation but also enables educators to generate more comprehensive and varied assessment materials, ultimately enhancing student learning outcomes through increased opportunities for practice and feedback.

While development is ongoing, our preliminary technical architecture demonstrates the feasibility of reducing the quiz creation process to 3-5 minutes through automation of format handling and direct API integration. Our research design includes planned quantitative analysis of time required for quiz creation and deployment, success rates of Canvas LMS integration, accuracy of technical content in generated assessments, and coverage of specified learning objectives.

The study's significance lies in its potential to democratize GenAI tool adoption in engineering education by removing technical barriers that limit widespread implementation. Next steps include completion of the integration tool, development of validation protocols for engineering content, and initiation of controlled testing with engineering educators. This research will contribute to understanding how automated tools can support the adoption of GenAI in engineering education while maintaining pedagogical quality.

Authors

Dr. John William Hassell OU Polytechnic Institute [biography]

John Hassell, PhD, MBA, an Associate Professor of Software Development at the OU Polytechnic Institute, brings over three decades of industry experience, primarily in the Tulsa region, to his teaching role. His expertise spans front and back-end commercial web application development, iPhone and Android mobile app creation, and embedded systems programming, with applications in various sectors including the oil and gas industry's upstream and downstream segments, and embedded systems projects for first responder and defense applications. Dr. Hassell combines his industry experience with a strong commitment to education, advocating for active learning in software development to equip students with practical skills. His entrepreneurial spirit led to the founding of ZigBeef in 2006, the University of Oklahoma's first student technology spinoff company, focusing on long-range cattle RFID technology. This company was a direct implementation of the ideas presented in his doctoral dissertation. Additionally, he has shared his insights into entrepreneurship as a past adjunct professor at the University of Tulsa, underscoring his dedication to bridging the gap between academia and industry practice through learning-by-doing.
Christopher Freeze http://orcid.org/0009-0000-6196-3853 The University of Oklahoma
Mr. Ahmed Ashraf Butt http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2047-8493 The University of Oklahoma [biography]

Dr. Ahmed Ashraf Butt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. He recently completed his Ph.D. in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University and pursued post-doctoral training at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He has cultivated a multidisciplinary research portfolio bridging learning sciences, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and engineering education. His primary research focuses on designing and developing educational technologies that facilitate various aspects of student learning, such as engagement. Additionally, he is interested in designing instructional interventions and exploring their relationship with first-year engineering (FYE) students’ learning aspects, including motivation and learning strategies. Prior to his time at Purdue, Dr. Butt worked as a lecturer at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, and has been associated with the software industry in various capacities.
H. Glen McGowan III Google [biography]

Glen McGowan has spent over two decades working in tech. He's a big-picture thinker, specializing in new technology incubation and co-innovation of massively distributed networks, data centers and systems. He's currently at Google, shaping AI product strategies and solutions for their cloud infrastructure business. Before that, he was at Dell Technologies, where he led cross functional teams developing cutting-edge hardware and automation products for large fortune 500 companies and drove technology acceleration through merger and acquisition. Glen started his career at Verizon, where he played a key role in product steering, new technology adoption, technical design and automation of global network systems.
William Ray Freeman

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

« View session

For those interested in:

computer science
information technology
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
Faculty