Design Thinking for AI Integration in a Leadership Course

As an emerging educational technology tool, ChatGPT has gained tremendous attention in diverse fields because of its capability to generate novel content. This study used ChatGPT to support a leadership course for graduate-level students in the field of Educational Technology. This study explores the possibilities and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Educational Technology through the lens of Design Thinking (DT) theoretical framework. DT guides this study through five processes: emphasize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This research presents the process of developing a lesson plan with ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to respond to a user’s prompts and produce humanlike conversational dialogue. An Empathy Map and Persona were used to analyze case scenarios addressing problems of practice. Canva.com was also utilized to visually construct and represent the Persona, facilitating a clearer understanding of the contextual dynamics and educational leaders’ perspectives. The researchers used various prompts on ChatGPT to create multiple lesson plans, which were refined into a single lesson plan. The final lesson plan was utilized for the graduate-level leadership course. The study’s limitations, suggestions for future studies, and implications are included.