Just wanted to ping you about a tool Joshua Gans and I launched publicly today after a year of trials at universities all over the world (and just a stupid amount of work!) which I think is up your alley.
Idea is simple: AI should be 1) personalized to the student, 2) personalized to the professor’s content, and 3) structured to improve rather than degrade learning. In a perfect world, we want every student to have individual-level assistance, at any time, in any language, in the format they want (a chatbot TA, a question bank, a sample test grader, etc.). We want all assignments to be adaptive “mastery learning”. We want the professor to have insight on a weekly basis into how students are doing, and even into topics they may have taught in a somewhat confusing way. And we want to do this basically for free.
Right now, we have either raw GPT or Claude accomplishing 1 but not 2 or 3 (and some evidence it degrades learning for some students), or we have classes big enough to build custom AI-driven classes (like Khan Academy for basic algebra). For the thousands of classes where the professor’s teaching is idiosyncratic, the latter set of tools is basically “give the students a random textbook off the library shelf on the topic and have them study it” – not at all what I want my students to do!
We set up a team including proper UX designers and backend devs and built this guy here: https://www.alldayta.com/. It’s drag-and-drop for your course audio/video, slides, handouts, etc., preprocesses everything is a much deeper raw than raw OCR or LLMs, then preps a set of tools. Right now, there is a student-facing “virtual TA” and an autosummary weekly of where students are having trouble with the rest rolling out once we’re convinced the beta version is high enough quality. In my classes, I’ve had up to 10000 interactions in a term with this, and we ran trials at [redacted]. And we can do it at like a buck or two a student across a term, spun up in like 30 minutes of professor time for smaller courses.
There’s a free trial anyone can just sign up for; if your colleagues or the MR crowd would be interested, definitely send it along. I put a Twitter thread up about it as well with some examples of where we are going and why we think this is where higher ed is headed: https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/1867632900956365307
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