Interactive GenAI is Enhancing Teaching & Learning
AI TAs
Morehouse College is set to introduce the world's first reported fully spatial AI Teaching Assistants in the fall 2024 semester, led by Dr. Muhsinah Morris, the world's first Metaversity Director. These innovative AI TAs, which have been created by Victory XR, are designed as 3D, animated avatars that interact with students in a spatial environment, accessible through a simple web URL on a Chrome browser. Unlike human TAs, these AI assistants are available 24/7, providing constant support and eliminating the need for traditional office hours.
The AI TAs are customized to the specific curriculum of each course, requiring minimal effort from instructors. They can handle multiple students simultaneously, increasing efficiency in addressing queries. Multilingual support makes them accessible to a diverse student population, while flexible access allows students to interact with the AI TAs through various devices, including Chromebooks, Macs, PCs, and VR headsets.
These AI assistants create a judgment-free environment for students to ask questions without fear of ridicule, potentially increasing engagement and participation. They provide real-time feedback on course content, helping students learn and progress at their own pace. The personalized learning experience is enhanced by tailored responses to individual queries. Interestingly, the AI avatars can be designed to resemble the students' professors, creating a more familiar and comfortable interaction environment.
Congratulations to former debater and debate coach, Steve Grubbs, founder VictoryXR!
AI-Enabled School
Andraj Karpathy, previously Director of AI @ Tesla and founding team @ OpenAI, recently announced Eureka Labs.
Eureka Labs is a new kind of school that is AI native. How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way.
Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them.
This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted).”
Pearson has integrated AI-powered study tools into 50 of its science titles, including introductory biology and chemistry texts. As of summer 2024, these AI-enhanced textbooks are being used by 70,000 students across more than 1,000 institutions. The fall 2024 semester will mark the first time AI textbooks become widespread in colleges and universities, including Ohio State University, the University of Miami, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Pearson's AI integration takes two forms:
A general chatbot that students can use to ask questions about the book's content and subject matter.
AI-powered practice questions that provide adaptive guidance. When a student answers incorrectly, the AI generates a series of follow-up questions designed to guide them toward the correct answer without directly revealing it.
Chris Hess, a former professor now serving as Pearson's director of AI product management for higher education, explained that this second feature aims to replicate the experience of a one-on-one office hours session with a professor. The AI's approach is designed to help students understand concepts through guided inquiry rather than simple correction.
Similar Tools Available to All
AI TAs, AI-enabled schools, and Pearson’s textbook chatbots are simply more advanced versions of technology available to all teachers and professors through tools such as GPTs (through ChatGPT), Playlab.ai, and NotebookLM, where teachers can upload course content for students to interact with. At least GPTs (the others may as well) have some capability to lead and teach a student. Using advanced technologies, the others push this further.
These applications push us further into AIEducation 2.0. AIEducation1.0 could potentially be described as using a tool such as Brisk that I reviewed yesterday — using AI to do largely what teachers already do in the classroom, such as creating slide shows and quizzes. AIEd2.0/the above now include the AI tools as active collaborators in teaching, the same way a debate team has multiple active human coaches.
In 2.0, these are still under the leadership of the teacher. ED3.0?
Thanks Stefan and really important ending question ‘In 2.0, these are still under the leadership of the teacher. ED3.0?’