Australia and New Zealand’s largest education technology provider has announced an Australian-first AI-powered feedback tool designed to provide students with immediate, adaptive and personalised support to improve learning outcomes.
Education Perfect’s AI capabilities have been previewed at EPIC 2024, in conjunction with a Google add-on that integrates with Google Classroom.
The innovation delivers annotations, comments and recommendations in seconds, all surfaced within EP’s extensive repository of lessons and course content, as well as the inherent knowledge embedded within its architecture.
As digital natives who’ve grown up with smart devices and other AI-powered technologies, today’s school students are increasingly turning to Generative AI to improve the way they study. User testing from Education Perfect’s user-base found 92 per cent of students found the AI feedback helpful, 85 per cent learned more and 83 per cent felt motivated to improve their answers.
Matt Adney is CPO at Education Perfect (EP) and told EducationDaily that “we are really at a transformation point in education with the introduction of Generative AI”.
EP is a fast-growing technology business already being used by 1.8+ million students, 50,000+ teachers in 5,000+ schools around the world.
The brand, Mr Adney says, has been partnering with schools and teachers for a long time to “help increase educational outcomes and learning outcomes and we are seeing a new wave of capability come through from this technology that is going to amplify what we’ve always tried to do – which is maximise student potential”.
“There’s a new realm of exciting possibility,” he says.
Overcoming fears to embrace potential
“it’s not going away,” says Mr Adney of the encroaching influence of AI in the classroom, adding that, although some families are unsure exactly what it means for their child’s educational future, the positive potential will far outweigh any fears.
“If you do look at some of those concerns, it’s around bias, it’s around privacy, and concerns around equitable access to education.”
He says one way EP endeavours to address those fears is to continue its consultative approach and collaborative efforts that focus on communicating with both educators and students.
“The way we have built and designed our technology in partnership with teachers and students – that we’ve done over a period of time – is addressing all of those concerns,” Mr Adney told EducationDaily.
“Rather than it being a general-purpose AI, it’s specific to the point of learning. The way that we’re prompting the AI and the way that we’re curating the feedback to the students in real-time is taking a lot of those concerns off the table.”
Tightening the learning loop for students
Shane Smith, Co-Founder of EP, has returned to the business to spearhead the new AI initiative.
“Rather than acting as an open-ended chatbot, EP’s AI tool is deeply integrated into existing teaching and learning workflows and tightens the learning loop for students. Students are progressively coached through the learning process and are supported and empowered to iterate and improve their responses as they build deep understanding of topics,” Mr Smith says.
Features of the EP AI-powered feedback tool include:
- Real-time and in-context feedback with easy-to-use interfaces and a Language Learning Model that aims to assist learners in developing and deepening their knowledge across English, science, history, geography and language learning
- 24-hour on demand access to individual learning support, in class or at home.
Personalised support in real-time
A lot of what teachers do in a classroom, Mr Adney says, is provide questions to students that check the students’ understanding of the work being studied.
“In our technology, we provide that learning capability and also that checking of understanding,” he told EducationDaily.
The EP AI tool asks the students a range of questions, including multiple choice, and when the student writes their answer as an extended response – a sentence, a paragraph, or even a page – the AI tool is now able to provide real-time feedback on that.
“Within a few seconds, we’re providing targeted comments back to the students,” he says.
For the students submitting their responses, receiving immediate AI-generated commentary that may let them know they’ve done something well, or advise them that something they’ve written requires more detail, enables them to correct as they go. The real-time feedback includes a 1-5 star rating – with a view to motivate the students to shape their work and improve it in the classroom, without waiting for the teacher to mark it and return it at a later time.
“So, they’re getting immediate, impactful feedback, right at that point that they’re trying to learn,” Mr Adney says.
“They are then encouraged to improve their response before they send it back to their teacher.”
But despite the talk that AI could replace teachers, Mr Adney says that is actually the opposite vision of how EP believes teaching should occur in classrooms.
“We see technology as augmenting what teachers are doing in the classroom – we don’t want to replace teaching. We’re looking at how to empower teachers so they can have an even greater impact.”
Without delays related to teachers having to mark students’ work in the days after they have completed it, Mr Adney told EducationDaily the tool will help teachers gain a deeper and faster understanding of where their students are at, to enable educators to offer greater support specific to each student’s learning deficits and strengths.
“Instead of (teachers) spending all the time doing the marking, they can adapt their teaching strategies so it’s more effective for the kids.”
Consultation with teachers and students at its core
EP’s co-founder Mr Smith says the tool’s alignment to The Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Schools aims to support educational best practices – not replace them – and was created to help teachers access insights into student usage patterns, performance, and common misconceptions.
“Our product has been developed in close partnership with teachers and students and refined to effectively support teaching and learning objectives whilst upholding ethical standards and promoting student success,” he says.
“Education Perfect’s vision for AI in education is one where machine, student and teacher work together to achieve the best learning outcomes.”
