As COVID-era needs for tutoring exceed availability, California nonprofit offers AI-powered alternative
Posted on 13-08-2022 08:05 pop.
CK-12, a nonprofit focused on pairing educational content with the latest technologies, has fully embraced artificial intelligence, giving students and teachers using its free learning system access to an AI-powered tutor dubbed Flexi.
Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping with homework and providing real-world examples of hard-to-grasp concepts.
Flexi is available to anyone with a CK-12 account, which is free to create. The AI tutor is just one of the many features CK-12 offers its users; the website also has a library of more than 10,000 digital textbooks and other resources that are all available for free.
While Flexi is still in its early stages and still has some limitations ― it can only answer questions that have been pre-programmed into its system ― CK-12 plans to continue developing the AI tutor so that it can eventually help students with any subject matter.
The AI-powered tutoring for students Flexi is a step in the right direction, taking FlexBooks one step further by allowing more interaction with students and more insight for teachers.
Hullihen states that students in her class use Flexi for work on assignments in FlexBooks however, they also use Flexi for other activities that are not related to the scope of. For instance, they worked on a project exploring potential energy, and they used Flexi as a tool to locate equations and to answer questions about analysis and conclusion. Shah says that the objective is to offer enough guidance in order to help students find the right answer, however there's no reason to stop when a student wishes to go straight into the final product.
The result of the continuous interaction between students and systems is feedback for teachers which has become an essential component of modern education technology as well as personalized education. FlexBooks was developed to enable teachers to incorporate it into their curriculum, and allow assignments using FlexBooks using popular online learning platforms like Canvas. Teachers Assistant product, specifically designed specifically for teachers to use FlexBooks helps students understand the content of assignments and gives information to the teacher regarding the progress of students.
For instance, if many students don't understand the same question in some assignment, the CK-12 system flags it to the teacher, telling them know that students did not understand the concept. This could help teachers spot any gaps in comprehension of students as well as help teachers modify their curriculum so that this issue won't occur later on.
"Teachers are thrilled about the insight component that allows them to see what students perform during a class," states Kaite Harmon, the senior program manager at CK-12.
Shah says that as students continue to study through technology, he hopes to make learning more relevant. "We are in a unique position that no one else has been offered previously," he says. "As as a community, I would like to think that we all get involved in this and achieve the educational outcomes that students deserve."