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By Sam Booth, Head of D&T; Oak National Academy
One of the most exciting aspects of working at Oak National Academy is seeing first-hand the development of its educational AI tools, Oak AI experiments.
The challenge for everyone who wants to use AI in education is that AI tools are trained on the general internet, which is comprehensive but often needs to be more accurate. There are inbuilt biases, and parts of it are simply unsafe for use in lessons for pupils. John Roberts, director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy, said in a recent interview with the Ed-Technical podcast, “It’s easy to make lesson content with AI, but it’s hard to make great lesson content with AI”.
Oak National Academy’s main work is developing high-quality curricular models and accompanying teaching resources to support lesson planning. With Oak AI experiments, we wanted to see if there was a role for AI to assist this lesson planning work. We started experimenting with two tools: an AI-powered quiz builder and an AI-powered lesson planner.
Our Quiz builder allows teachers to generate answers and distractors in minutes, which can then be shared or exported into formats to take away and use in the classroom. Our lesson planner is tailored to teachers' needs using our curriculum and is designed to save time and be easily adaptable for each class. Plans can be exported to take away and used for planning.
We enlisted the help of teachers to test these tools with promising results. Over 10,000 quizzes and lesson plans have been built, but there’s more to do. AI is highly variable from subject to subject and requires careful tuning and training to meet the standards required for education.
Oak is rolling out new, high-quality educational content created by teachers, openly licensed and quality checked. Our AI tools will draw from this content so teachers can be secure in the knowledge that what is generated is high quality and safe for classroom use. Next year, alongside other subjects, we will release our new key stage 1 to 4 design and technology curriculum. Our AI tools will be able to draw from this curriculum and become even more powerful at quiz building and lesson planning.
The video exemplifies experimenting with the Oak AI quiz builder and designing a starter quiz for a key stage 3 design and technology lesson. It's not easy to write high-quality multiple-choice questions. It’s even harder to write good distractors. You’ll see it’s not always perfect, but it showcases these tools' time-saving possibilities. Once we have our design and technology curriculum to draw from, these tools will become even more powerful.
Speaking to Ed-Technical, John said, “Lots of teachers will use Oak as a starting point and then use their experience and expertise to amplify our resources. We have a bank of high-quality multiple-choice questions, and our AI tools are trying to regenerate these questions to the same quality as the human teachers through retrieval augmented generation using our curriculum content.”
We are now entering Phase 2, where we will improve the educational quality of these tools and ensure large numbers of teachers can use them.
Phase 2 will also mean helping other developers who want to develop AI tools to draw on Oak’s high-quality teaching resources, not just the general internet. We want to support a flourishing market of different providers to develop great AI tools drawing on reliable, high-quality content.
We will also ask teachers what else would help them with lesson planning work that AI could support. Our AI tools are continually developing, and we welcome feedback from teachers to help iterate them. Does it save teachers time, and does it positively impact learning?
You can hear more from John Roberts regarding Oak AI experiments on the Ed-Technical podcast, available here.
John’s article in TES is also available here, where he talks about the future of Oak AI experiments.
Sam Booth is the Design and Technology subject lead at Oak National Academy. He is leading the creation of a fully resourced key stage 1 to key stage 4 curriculum model for design and technology. Sam has 16 years of experience as a teacher, STEM coordinator, subject leader and adviser.
X: @samboothdt LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samboothdt
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