AI Driven Education
The challenges
We developed LearnLevels to tackle two major issues in education: the increasingly high workload for teachers and the lack of focus on individual students.
High workload for teachers
Teachers spend a significant amount of time on administrative tasks and repeating classroom explanations. As a result, they have less time to provide students with the personal guidance they deserve, to work on developing projects and to make knowledge relevant by linking it to a current societal context. In the short term, this is frustrating for teachers. In the long term, a teacher's job is likely to become less attractive. This might result in fewer candidates pursuing a career in teaching, which further increases the workload for teachers.
Little focus on individual students
In class, students attend lessons which are designed for the average student. These average lessons are too difficult for some and too easy for others. Students are expected to put this knowledge into “practice” while doing homework on their own. If a student gets stuck, there often is no way to get help. This leads to frustration, demotivation and may result in lower or failing grades.
The solution
Modular
The first step in solving these issues is to radically change the curriculum structure. The LearnLevels curriculum is based on small building blocks: fine-grained learning objectives. This approach makes sure that a student gets exactly the right explanation.
Adaptive
The network structure allows for a variety of paths that a student can follow. We developed an algorithm to help students navigate this network. By using LearnLevels, students can follow a learning path that best suits their needs, in their own time, at their own pace.
Insightful
Based on the student's progress teachers can better prepare for in-class sessions. During class sessions, teachers pay attention to applications, solving complex problems and working in teams on various projects and practicals.
Other benefits
Equal access
When preparing for exams, students – or their parents – often pay for tutoring. This can be very beneficial, but unfortunately isn’t available for all students. In fact, the dependence on tutoring is increasing inequality between income groups. We believe that all students should be able to effectively prepare for their exams. That’s why we work on A.I. supported exam training. Based on practice exams, LearnLevels can accurately pinpoint a student’s knowledge gaps and provide explanations for those specific learning objectives.
Serving the teacher community
In addition to being a platform that serves educational content to students, LearnLevels offers teachers a variety of tools with which they can develop new content, re-use content created and shared by the community and contribute to improving the quality of education material.
By providing a modular framework of specific learning objectives, teachers can individually contribute to a large system of education content. One teacher might be good at creating effective concept checks. Another teacher might be better at writing explanations. With a shared set of learning objectives, LearnLevels can link it all together.
Only the beginning
Physics and sustainabilty as the starting point
At the moment, LearnLevels contains over 1200 videos and infographics that cover the physics high school curriculum in The Netherlands, as well as a broad basis about sustainability. The next step is adding content for other STEM courses. Our modular approach enables a perfect integration between disciplines, allowing interdisciplinary projects to focus on our societal challenges.