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 Assistance

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

Edsby has introduced a Teacher AI Assistant that provides the following for teachers:

Content authoring: Edsby provides teachers with ways to author a range of content, including lessons, assessments, class posts, journal notes, observations, and more. We have added an option that enables the teacher to provide content requests to a generative AI engine. Examples include “create a 200-word summary of the history of the country of New Zealand,” or “provide an overview of the Krebs cycle.” This speeds content authoring for teachers and generates it in a manner that respects the reading level of the students being taught.

Online Quiz assistance: Edsby has a flexible online quiz system. With the Teacher AI Assistant, a teacher can auto generate Edsby question sheets with generative AI tools. A teacher only has to provide instructions on desired questions, e.g. such as the number of questions of what type desired. The teacher can then edit, extend, or modify the questions.

Grading assistance: External tools such as Grammarly can provide written content analysis. But external tools are an extra expense and unintegrated with Edsby. The Edsby Teacher AI Assistant can provide writing analysis and feedback, including identifying grammatical and spelling issues, and even draft evaluation information for a teacher to review and refine. This can help reduce teacher time spent grading.

Reporting assistance: 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. The Edsby Teacher AI Assistant can generate sample report card comments leveraging much of this information, already known to Edsby, in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the security of student data.

Student AI Applications Under Exploration

Students are envisioned to able to benefit from 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.