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Enhance teaching and learning with Microsoft Copilot: Course review

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Copilot icon: 3D logo with a gradient of blue, green, yellow, and pink colors, casting a soft shadow on a white background

University of Minnesota faculty, staff, and students currently have access to Microsoft Copilot. It describes itself as “your everyday AI companion” that provides better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative.

When prompted, Copilot suggests that higher education professionals might use it for:

  • Code assistance and learning
  • Research and writing
  • Collaboration
  • Course material creation
  • Accessibility and inclusivity 

ATSS staff members completed the Enhance teaching and learning with Microsoft Copilot course to help us understand how to use the platform and to evaluate the course to determine if it would be helpful for the UMN community. This post provides an overview of the course, our exploration process, and key takeaways.

Course overview

This course delves into Microsoft Copilot for education by familiarizing yourself with its modes and features for designing effective prompts and analyzing results (source: AI x Education newsletter). It is one of three courses in Microsoft Learn’s AI for educators track. Each course takes approximately 60 minutes to complete and offers a certificate of completion.

Learners who complete the course will be able to do the following tasks with the tool:

  • Summarize the basics of Microsoft Copilot and how they can help educators
  • Use Copilot and use the basic functionality provided in all its features
  • Design prompts that support teaching and learning
  • Judge the responses produced by Copilot for overall quality and credibility

Our exploration process 

After signing up for the course, we also signed into Copilot to simultaneously try the course prompts on our own and see the results.

We signed in to Copilot with our University internet IDs and passwords to enable Copilot’s commercial data protection. To confirm that we were signed in, we verified that we saw a green checkmark in the top-right corner of our screens, as shown in the image to the right. This means that prompts and responses are not saved and Microsoft does not have access to the data to train the language model. 

The course provided sample prompts, which we used as they were written. Some of us modified the prompts to make them relevant to our specific teaching and learning context. For example, one of the prompts read: 

Respond as a secondary history teacher. The learners will write an essay on "The Impact of World War II on Modern Society." Write the assignment details for the learners.

We modified this prompt to:

Respond as an instructional designer who is creating a professional development program for higher education faculty. The learners will create an assignment on "Integrating generative AI into your assignments." Write the assignment details for the learners.

One of the other course topics was working with images. We applied this topic to explore creating alt text for images. One of us (Jennifer) used an image from the course in a presentation slide deck and wanted to create alt text for it. She uploaded the image on the right and used the prompt “Create alt text for this image that describes the content.” 

The output was:
An infographic showcases the benefits of Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection. It includes four purple icons on a light background, representing different benefits:
Searches are not linked to individual user accounts.
Prompts and responses are not saved.
Chat data is not used to train large language models (LLMs) used by AI.
No one at Microsoft can view your data.
At the bottom right corner, there’s the Microsoft logo. This image highlights privacy and security features related to data protection in Microsoft Copilot.

While the output was accurate, it was lengthy: 802 characters instead of the 125-character recommended range. She then prompted Copilot to ‘trim the text to 125 characters’ with the following result: An infographic showing components of Microsoft Copilot’s data protection: searches not linked to users, prompts/responses not saved, chat data not used for AI training, and no Microsoft access to your data. While Copilot didn’t adhere to the 125-character limit specified in the prompt, it reduced the text length and gave her a good starting point for additional edits.

Takeaways

If you are new to using AI tools, this course will help you experiment with generative AI and learn some basic ins and outs of writing prompts. The course and example prompts provided a safe place to use AI. It was beneficial to have Copilot open and use it as we went through the course, such as copying and pasting the course prompts.

The Microsoft Edge browser provides additional features like summarizing a website or composing email messages.

We also found references to Microsoft products that the University of Minnesota does not license, such as Office 365. Therefore, we would not have access to them and/or be able to use them.

Resources

Contributors

Jennifer Englund, Rebecca George-Burrs, and Sara Schoen contributed to the writing of this post

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