- The dumbest way to use AI in education is when one AI performs tasks instead of the student, and another AI evaluates and provides feedback instead of the teacher ☹️
- But is there a way to use AI not for this purpose but to significantly enhance the value and effectiveness of learning?
- Absolutely! If we develop the ideas embedded in these AI platforms:
Project essence
The goal of Packback is “to make every school student or student fearlessly curious and able to find their own voice.”
When a student’s task is only to memorize what the teacher says and then retell it as an answer to an assignment, it is unlikely to promote curiosity or the formation of their own perspective on the world around them 😉
Therefore, Packback strives to supplement the traditional learning process with two of its own tools, essentially built on the same technology.
The first tool is “Questions” (Packback Questions). The startup suggests that teachers organize a chat for their students where they can ask other students questions on topics they want to delve deeper into or discuss.
However, a chat without moderation sooner or later turns into a hotbed of spam or aggression. Therefore, the first function of “Questions” is to moderate students’ questions and answers. Moreover, not so much in terms of observing communication ethics but in terms of the value of the questions and answers published for the learning process.
For example, the AI moderator will not allow the question “What is osmosis?” to be published because it is a “closed” question, the answer to which can be copied from a textbook. Instead, the AI moderator will suggest formulating an “open” question that may imply different answers that other students must find and formulate themselves. Thus, even rejected messages by the moderator become a learning tool.
The AI moderator works not only on the principle of “allowed/not allowed.” For each question or answer published in the chat by a student, it also assigns a “rating,” taking into account both formal features like correct formatting and citation of sources, and the informal level of curiosity embedded in the message.
The second function of “Questions” is to engage students in discussions held in class. Here, the platform’s AI assistant acts not only as a simple moderator but as a whole teacher’s assistant.
Firstly, the AI assistant can instantly and publicly comment on students’ questions and answers — at the very least, praising successful messages and possibly drawing attention to flaws in other messages.
Secondly, the teacher can set minimum requirements for students’ participation in the discussion. For example, each of them must publish a certain number of questions and answers per month. Or each student must answer a certain question published in the chat by a certain date or time. The AI assistant will monitor this and send the teacher a list of students who have not met these requirements.
Thirdly, the AI assistant regularly compiles and sends the teacher a summary of the activity of all students in the chat — who wrote how many messages, what average ratings each student received for their messages, and what final grade for activity can be assigned to them.
The second tool of the Packback platform is “Dive” (Packback Deep Dives). This is a tool that helps students write longer texts (essays, papers), and teachers — to evaluate them.
The first function of “Dive” is automatic instant prompts that advise the student on how to improve the text being created on the platform or a text they have already written and uploaded to the platform.
The second function is a special advisor on formatting citations of sources. This advisor gives the student a credibility rating for the cited source and automatically formats the citation and link in the standard format for research papers.
The third function is essentially the same but on the teacher’s side. Only now, the AI assistant gives the teacher prompts on what grades can be assigned to the student’s completed work — using the same criteria as for the prompts to the student during its execution. The teacher can agree with the suggested AI rating or assign their own.
Thus, by using the PackBack platform, a teacher can organize meaningful class activity and involve all students in it. At the same time, they will spend their time not on correcting obvious mistakes in “how” the student writes — but on providing feedback on “what” they write.
The experience of using Packback shows that such student activities actually affect their grades — naturally, in the direction of improvement 😉
As a result, the Packback platform is used in their educational process by 600 schools and universities in the USA and Canada.
However, the platform can be used not only in schools and universities but also individually, even if the school or university has not implemented this platform.
Currently, Packback has raised another $1.5 million in investments, bringing the total investment in the project to $12.2 million.
What’s interesting
The simplest way to use AI in the educational process is when a student uses ChatGPT to complete tasks instead of them: solving problems, writing essays, and papers. This method is certainly simple, but it carries no educational value. Moreover, it completely kills this value ☹️
Packback believes that the role of AI in education should not be “substituting” but “guiding” (instructional). In other words, AI should not do anything “instead of” students. It should teach them “how” to do it — guiding their thoughts and actions in the right direction.
This immediately reminds us of “Socratic” — a teaching method once used by Socrates. He said that he couldn’t teach anyone anything — he could only make the student think.
Therefore, Socrates’ teaching method consisted of systematically asking students questions — by answering which they gradually came to the necessary conclusions. Whether necessary for Socrates or necessary for the student is another question 😉 The important thing is that it became the student’s own opinion, fully realized by them.
Last time, I remembered Socratic in the summer of 2023 when I wrote a review of the startup Sizzle, which raised $7.5 million in its very first investment round.
This startup made an app to help with homework. However, the main principle of the app is not to do the task for the student but to give them step-by-step hints so they can do the task themselves. Thus, the Sizzle app transformed from a “cheat sheet” into a learning tool. And this principle is similar to Socratic and to the concept of today’s Packback.
Another problem in the educational process is the amount of feedback that students receive from the teacher. After all, feedback, not the transmission of knowledge, is the most important part of learning.
But providing regular and meaningful feedback to all students in the volume they need is something teachers in regular classes and courses usually cannot do — because teachers lack the time and energy for it. Nor the money they get paid for this education 😉
The emergence of AI allows us to start solving this problem. However, here too, one cannot fall into the same extreme as when tasks are performed by students. If feedback is completely handed over to AI, it can turn into a “hollowed-out” set of general words that do not reflect the teacher’s own educational concept.
The startup Graide, which raised £2.5 million in investments, about which I wrote at the beginning of March, helps the teacher reduce the time and effort spent on giving feedback — while staying within their own educational concept. The feature of their platform is that the AI assistant of the platform provides students with feedback based on the feedback that the teacher has already given on similar work.
And there are quite a lot of similar works in the general flow. Moreover, if the teacher has been teaching the same thing for several years, sooner or later they accumulate a database for automatically giving feedback on almost every variant of the student’s answer 😉
Today’s Packback follows the same feedback concept, as their AI engine automatically provides feedback in the chat of students or on completed work only based on typical and formal criteria — leaving the substantive part of the feedback to the teacher. But even this saves significant time for the teacher and ensures the immediacy of typical and formal reactions.
Well, the third problem of traditional education is that it often becomes boring. And when a student is bored, educational material goes in one ear and out the other ☹️
AI can help teachers make the learning process more engaging — for example, by generating interesting presentations on new topics and questions for lessons that can arouse interest and increase student engagement in the learning process.
This is what the startup Curipod is doing, about which I wrote last autumn. This Norwegian startup has made a platform that helps school teachers make their lessons more interesting and inspiring — and they raised $4.8 million in the first investment round for the promotion of their platform in the USA.
Today’s Packback also tries to involve students in the learning process, but their main tool is the organization and maintenance of discussions on the topics studied in class.
Where to Head
The general direction of potential movement is the creation of platforms and tools for integrating AI into educational processes.
The main pain points to aim for this are:
- Increasing the interest and engagement of students in the learning process.
- Increasing the quantity and quality of feedback that students can receive from teachers and other students.
- Reducing the time spent by students and teachers on performing routine and formal actions in the learning process.
- Cultivating the ability of students to think independently and draw conclusions.
Roughly speaking, AI should not try to replace students and teachers, where one AI would perform tasks instead of students and another AI would evaluate and provide feedback instead of teachers. This will ultimately lead to one AI learning from another 😉
AI in the educational process should essentially act as a calculator — so that students don’t have to do calculations manually, and teachers don’t have to recount these calculations. The time saved on this could be devoted to more substantive questions, developing students’ brains at a qualitatively different level — what exactly they will calculate, why it’s needed at all, and whether some other arithmetic could be invented for this task 😉
The topic of AI in education is new, so undoubtedly, many new ideas can be invented here. And what do you think, how else can AI be used in education to significantly increase its value and effectiveness?
Well, if there are no new thoughts on this topic, then it is quite possible to focus on the development of those directions that have already been laid down in the startups mentioned today 😉
About the Company
Packback
Website: packback.co
Last Round: $1.5M, 21.03.2024
Total Investments: $12.2M, Rounds: 8