COMPUTING & IT RESOURCES How AI and ML helps every student reach their full potential
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can identify students who are struggling, enable early interventions, and create tailor-made learning pathways. By Tony Lteif, EMEA Head of Education at AWS
A I and ML are
transforming the field of education with powerful insights about the way students learn best. They enable us to monitor an individual’s learning progress, develop
intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that can answer questions and give feedback on assignments when teachers are not available, and gather data through continuous assessment to gain
warnings with teachers so that they can intervene early and help students get back on track.
Tony Lteif
meaningful insights about learners. From AI-powered assessment tools to learning management systems, which allow educators to create personalized learning experiences, AI and ML offer educational institutions powerful tools to ensure the success of every student.
Most importantly, advances in AI and ML have powered new tools that can identify students that are at risk of failing a course, dropping out, or who are exhibiting behavioral cues that indicate the need for extra support. Educational institutions traditionally used prior performance warning systems, which flag existing issues with academic performance, attendance, and behavior to identify the students that are most at risk. Major limitations of traditional warning systems are that they present an incomplete image of student knowledge improvement areas, offer a static educational approach that does not adapt to varying learning styles, and most importantly, that interventions often occur too late to make a meaningful impact on educational outcomes.
AI and ML enable schools to quickly and accurately process large volumes of data that take into account prior academic performance and much more: the U.S. Department of Education found that 16-44% of schools surveyed also consider complex out-of-school factors like campus infrastructure, gender, family structure, and socioeconomic background. Highly-customizable warning systems using these technologies offer more than just a risk rating, and can be developed to create predictive timelines: knowing the projected number of days before a student may drop out of school or fail a class allows educators to provide critical interventions earlier.
AI-powered diagnostic testing reveals knowledge gaps Many edtechs are pioneering AI and ML technologies to offer earlier interventions to students in need. Alef Education’s intelligent learning platform uses adaptive diagnostic testing and an exam prediction model to alert educators about students who are struggling. The diagnostic test questions begin at a randomized difficulty level and then adapt to students’ responses in real time to evaluate their knowledge across multiple expertise areas, setting aside assumptions about a student’s skill, grade, and language levels.
After moving the platform to the cloud, Alef Education uses services like Amazon SageMaker, which creates machine learning models to better understand each student’s learning behavior, and Amazon RedShift, which allows Alef to process over 100 million unique data points that reveal nuances about each student’s abilities and generate intelligent recommendations for teachers to support students effectively. More insights can be gleaned from student feedback about test questions: Alef Education designed a user feedback mechanism where ratings about question difficulty can reveal patterns that indicate underlying issues with reading or problem-solving. The AI-powered prediction model tracks data including user activity, completed courses, and feedback to identify students at risk of failing and share those
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Engage struggling students with tailored learning paths AI and ML enable students to benefit from a high degree of personalization, connecting users to the right materials at the right time in their educational journey. Madrid-based digital education organization Odilo utilizes AI to provide tailor-made learning experiences for users from schools, universities, governments, and enterprises. Its vast e-learning content catalog connects users all over the world to more than four million educational resources including books, classes, and audio/video content in 43 languages. The company’s Unlimited Learning Ecosystems, intelligent content platforms, analyze data about each individual to provide recommendations and learning plans that are constantly adapting in real time. “We are revolutionizing the way we learn by heavily personalizing the experience for each person. From intelligent profiling to customized learning pathways, it empowers users with AI-driven content selection, tailoring formats, themes, levels, and language,” explains Fátima Bigeriego, the company’s strategic partnership director. “Odilo has moved from traditional standardized learning to focus on the individuality and particular way of learning of each user.”
Analyzing data to create a seamless experience for over 170 million users is no small feat, and Odilo utilizes over 40 cloud services including AWS Personalize, an ML service that analyzes user interactions like content views and purchase history to create a highly personalized learning experience that adapts in real time to the needs of each group and individual. The Community of Madrid implemented Odilo’s learning ecosystem to boost youth literacy and learning skills, and within three years, users accessed 57,300 different educational materials over 2.5 million total learning hours. Odilo created over 4,500 individualized reading plans that were tailored to each child’s interests and knowledge level for a more engaging experience.
“We envision education in a way that goes beyond imposition and regulations, where users are empowered to know, desire, and choose to learn mainly because the entire ecosystem adapts to them,” Bigeriego says. “In this journey, the cloud is indispensable, as the massive datasets required to make this a reality need storage and other services,” including Amazon Sagemaker, which allows Odilo to classify its massive content catalog with greater precision and make accurate recommendations. “In this regard, AWS has been our steadfast partner from the beginning, supporting us day by day in reinforcing our goal.”
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