Edsby & AI

Edsby & AI

Posted on by Dallas Kachan

Edsby has a plan to carefully incorporate artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exciting. But given the unique security and privacy challenges of K-12, we’ve been thinking carefully about where it should most effectively and safely be applied in the Edsby platform for K-12. With AI, just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it should be. Ensuring the safety of student data governs much of how Edsby works today.

We expect to begin releasing a series of enhancements incorporating AI in 2024, however the timing and exact functionality of what may be delivered when are subject to many factors. The following outlines our intention.

Considerations

Privacy

Edsby is entrusted with highly sensitive structured and unstructured information about students, parents and staff. This includes identity, assessment data, attendance data, observations, insights, comments, essays, messages, and much more. Some considerations about that include:

  • Customers own the data they provide to the Edsby platform, along with the content their users generate within the Edsby platform as outlined in Edsby’s Services Privacy Policy.
  • Customers may not want to consider solutions that don’t provide the same sort of data stewardship Edsby does. And many new AI tech platforms mix and mingle supplied data with data from others.

Any AI-based solution incorporated within the Edsby platform needs to provide the same level of strong data management that Edsby itself provides today.

Human Factors

Change management is a big challenge in K-12 learning organizations due to their large size, diverse stakeholders and small technology teams. These organizations have only recently seen widespread adoption of online technology in the classroom and by key stakeholders including students, staff and parents. Careful consideration needs to be given when thinking about introducing new technologies to these groups:

  • Students embrace new technologies quickly, however not all new tech is appropriate for all their use cases.
  • Staff are keen to have solutions that save them time so they can focus more on teaching and working with students. They aren’t expected to entertain solutions that take away their ability to manage how they teach and assess. Nor are they, or their labor organizations, apt to embrace solutions they view as threatening to their jobs.
  • Parents want to be more engaged in their child’s learning journey. But they want to do so in authentic ways with quality input from professional teachers. Parents are already rejecting solutions they view as mechanical and lacking appropriate personalization from teachers, for example, even from simple sources such as the use of comment banks by teachers for report cards.

Teacher AI Applications Under Exploration

Teachers are the “quarterbacks” in Edsby. They have the widest range of tools in the Edsby platform, and Edsby’s research has identified a broad set of potential applications for AI tech for them. Work has started on several of these.

Content Authoring Assistant: Edsby provides teachers with ways to author a range of content, including lessons, assessments, class posts, journal notes, observations, and more. Our early experiments show the viability of adding an option that enables the teacher to provide content requests to a generative AI engine. Examples would include “create a 200-word summary of the history of the country of New Zealand,” or “provide an overview of the Krebs cycle.” This could simplify and speed content authoring for teachers. This capability could also be tied into the way curriculum standards are managed in Edsby so the teacher could instead select portions of the curriculum (for example “A2.1” and “A2.4”) and request content that explains the standards selected in a student-friendly way.

Online Quiz Assistant: Edsby has a flexible online quiz system. But it can take a teacher time to build out an online quiz. Early experimentation has confirmed the viability of auto generating Edsby question sheets with generative AI tools. An early version of this in development can auto-generate an Edsby quiz from material already in Edsby, for example by selecting a Unit in the Content Builder, and providing instructions on the desired online questions, e.g. such as the number of questions of each type desired. The teacher will then be able to edit, extend, or modify the question sheet.

Grading Assistant: Today, Edsby integrates with external tools such as Turnitin and Unicheck for written content analysis. However, external tools are an extra expense and complicated. An integrated AI grading assistant could potentially provide initial analysis and feedback, including identifying grammatical and spelling issues, and even draft evaluation information for a teacher to review and refine. Edsby believes this could reduce teacher time spent grading and is experimenting to validate this.

Reporting Assistant: An important and time-consuming aspect of a teacher’s job is creating input for report cards. Best practices are to evaluate a wide range of considerations beyond a simple weighted average grade calculation. Teachers often consider recent performance trends, level of consistency in performance, and so on. Edsby believes an appropriate integration of AI tools could help here. An AI-powered reporting assistant is expected to be able to generate sample report card comments, potentially by leveraging an existing teacher comment library and the student’s performance beyond their final calculated grade.

Student AI Applications Under Exploration

Students are envisioned to able to benefit AI solutions within Edsby including:

Content Coach: Edsby believes it could be beneficial to students to have an integrated “content coach” that could analyze content the student has generated for spelling and grammatical issues, sentiment analysis, and overall clarity and coherence. This could apply to a broad range of areas, including class and group posts, submitted work, and even Edsby messages to teachers and other students.

Ask Edsby: Edsby recently introduced a new AI-powered chatbot for users on its public www.edsby.com website. This bot is able to respond to a large number of end user questions regarding how to get things done in Edsby. We’re considering a role-based version of this into the Edsby product. The existing public website bot is restricted to Edsby-published help files as the body of knowledge from which it draws, and any similar system in the Edsby product will be similarly restricted.

Data/Analytics AI Applications Under Exploration

Edsby provides powerful analytics that provide teachers, school administrators, and district administrators with insights into trends in many different areas including enrolment, attendance, reporting, student performance, and more. The user experience today leverages modern business intelligence software and includes standard graphical features for filtering, drill-down, and so on. But the data views available are often constrained by what the dashboard developer felt would be useful, and end users may not all be familiar with business intelligence software and may be reluctant to explore and use power features like filters and drilldowns.

We are exploring and expect to use new AI-based facilitates to:

  • Create more natural user experiences for users who are not experts in using business intelligence software. These user experiences are imagined as supporting both text and spoken requests. An example of such a request is “show me how many students in Grade 3 are currently averaging below 70% in mathematics and how that is trending over the last 3 years.” If a school administrator asks such a question, Edsby would show them the results for their school. If a district superintendent asks such a question, the results would be district-wide.
  • Create more powerful user experiences that leverage machine learning to provide predictive capabilities. Such a request could be similar to “show me the students in Grade 9 math that are likely to fail this year based on their performance so far.”

Conclusion

Edsby is encouraged by the promise of AI. Watch for a gradual introduced of AI-powered capabilities as we take a careful approach to evaluating where the application of this technology can provide the biggest returns with the least risk to our K-12 partner organizations.