PE Chapter 8— Chattodo for schools
Continued from Step 4 of Preseeded.preseed.in.
Get some sense of the problem.
How will Chattodo be useful to traditional schools and teachers?
Chattodo is a long-term product which shall grow into its complete disruptive potential over time. This disruption might not happen within our lifetimes, and to expect it to happen from within a deeply entrenched system might seem as fantastic as far-fetched, yet that doesn’t deter us, to make it happen form outside.
Chattodo’s first adapters within the existing system of education will be children of ideas- those who are looking out from within the system, to find something that addresses their curiosities and allows them to explore their potential beyond the confines of classrooms.
Who are these children? Those with entrepreneurial spirits, those with alternative thought frameworks, those who wish NOT to conform. In the universe of a billion plus students, these shall be our earliest and greatest stakeholders.
Why will such children use Chattodo? They will to indicate the education they are earning through ideas they have, projects they are building to give shape to these ideas, and tasks they are doing to delve deeper into their ideas. These are students who want to do something beyond and independent of what the teacher confines them to. These are children who will build startups, who will learn life lessons from the collaborations that they will undertake, children who will build practical skills while trying to find themselves. There must be millions of such students across the world who use different apps on the internet to communicate and do tasks with like minded peers and collaborators. .
Chahttodo is being built for such students first.
It is also build on the premise that such children of ideas will not need their schools to find Chattodo. They will find it, as they do so much else, on Product hunt and Hacker News. That will be the strength of Chattodo- that it will be discovered by those who need it, without formal introductions through a system they have a healthy irreverence for anyway.
Then someday when a sizeable number of students have discovered this medium of learning and collaboration, schools will realise that they must adapt to the new order and start aiding students in using and creating better content and accomplishing tasks on this app.
For now, let us have students reach us- as they reach out to the Google search engine, Khan academy or Youtube has reached them. Let it be consumer driven NOT enterprise driven.
It takes one great company to disrupt the status quo. Incumbents fade away if they do not catch up to the probable new order timely. Disrupting the current system of education is a challenge and an ordeal. Too much is at stake- too many have corrupted and corroded it. Yet it is a task that needs to be done, and done well. We have a real chance at doing just that.
Our solution is a simple and iterative vision of design that can be understood and used by everyone from the phones they cannot do without.
During the last 10 years I have envisioned, understood and partially manifested the construct of the social web to devise a new system of education for — the NEW — education upon collaboration that moves far ahead of passive content sharing.
May the thinking students of the world, our lovers, brothers, sisters, parents and children, build, before they learn, earn or burn.
How will Chattodo be useful to traditional schools and teachers?
A lot of potential investors have asked me how teachers and schools will use this product —
- The simplest and first answer to that is- we are not making this as a mass product for schools or teachers. This is a product for individuals who may happen to be students but are oriented to building their startups and working with remotely located collaborators on ideas and projects they are interested in, independent of their identity as students. We are thus first addressing the student who wants to work independently of schools and teachers. The western world is witnessing a rising tide of such students, India has not been untouched. Now is the time for Chattodo. However, we are not making this product for India as such, but for a market which is most appropriate and most ready for it. India will soon get to this readiness too, once, we touch the western world with it.
- The second strand of my answer has to do with what is termed the ‘pyramid strategy’. Chattodo is not only novel for the Indian market, it is novel for any market anywhere in the world, including San Francisco- the best market of the world’s most influential early adopters Launching the product for the early influencers there means the rest of the world, at the lower blocks of the pyramid will adapt the technology as it trickles down to them from those in Silicon Valley who decide which are the best technologies of the day and of the future.
Our focus thus will be to build Chattodo as an individual’s product to be marketed on Product Hunt, Hacker News and other geeky platforms. We shall win these platforms without being confused as yet another Software as a Service solution for schools and teachers. However if our Indian partners wish to market it in India while we market it to Silicon Valley, they are most welcome and we can build a separate, attention grabbing module for schools in India. Chattodo is is first a product for productive people. It is a product ready for worthy consideration by an independent student/productive being, irrespective of a school’s choice.
The far-sighted among those who wish to invest in us will acknowledge that when fully understood, the product will move students to adopting a culture of doing tasks around their own ideas while and perhaps despite being in school. Chattodo will catalyse a shift for such students, much in the same way, as whatsapp or snapchat did.
“We talk all the time about how a business really is like a person…and that if you are trying to live up to other people’s expectations, you’re going to live a miserable life. If you’re trying to be something you’re not, everybody’s going to know it, and nobody’s going to think highly of you for it. And the truer that you can be to yourself, the better chance you have of fully realizing your potential.” — Nick Woodman, CEO and cofounder at GoPro.
Our Indian investors who believe in the above are invited to visit the links below to know what may be the modules we will build for Indian Schools exclusively to use our app as one unit-:
- CSV format file which will onboard students and teachers together, all at once, to communicate on this app with each other.
- An AI powered chatbot to assist teachers and students in communication, personality development and delivery of tasks towards and among each other.
Social network based project sharing platform
Students in Engineering colleges and professional are involved in various projects. But there is no one platform where they can share their projects or gather opinion or recognition in the community. This community can be their college or their company. People are also interested to know about some trending projects happening in a particular field. This way even collaboration can happen in a better manner. Projects would be searchable by field or by college or by company.
Like github is there for coders and programmers there is no one general platform where people in fields like electronics or mechanical can share their projects. People can upvote a project so basically an opinion can be generated over a project and it can help in getting recognition also.
Students are always interested in knowing about the projects happening in their colleges or some particular college. Eg. A student who is active in machine learning field would want to know what are some trending projects happening in that field and with whom they can connect to gain more knowledge or maybe to collaborate on a particular project.
So initially We can start by targeting college students particularly in engineering colleges and then we can scale up to professionals and professions other than engineering like medical. Especially in medical field it has huge application. As for medical professionals their projects are their cases. Will tell you more about it once we have discussed up till now.
Chattodo chatbot vision for schools
The base on which Chattodo is being developed is the social network of actions and pillars which will strengthen it are Chatbots, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning and AI. Chatbot are about to change the world in more ways than we can imagine. From ordering pizza online to mashing faces together in Project Murphy, chatbots are about to become a normal element in everyday life.
As the scope of chatbots becomes broader every day, there are new applications popping up constantly. Education has traditionally been known as a sector where innovation moves slowly. During the most recent years, there has been a large hype over innovative tools to enhance teaching and learning through educational technology. The time has come for chatbots and artificial intelligence to meet the educational sector. Already, there’s a lot happening but there is no question technology will have an even deeper reach in the near future.
Education is much less pragmatic and tech-obsessed than the corporate market. It is a strict and heavily regulated system. Although many ground breaking technologies were patented by universities, educational institutions are not good at using their own inventions for improving the learning process.
Students who attend the same class have different skills, interests, and abilities. That is why they need personal tutors, who can provide one-on-one lectures. Unfortunately, even some of the most expensive schools and colleges in the world are not able to provide this type of service. That is why chatbots are the most logical and affordable alternative for personal learning.
For Chattodo, our vision for chatbots encompasses these use cases:
1. Automatic Essay Scoring
Giving feedback on individual written essays is an enormously time demanding task that many teachers struggle with, and in massive open online courses, the problem is even larger. Because there are often over 1000 students in one class, there’s simply no realistic way to give individual feedback to written essays. By feeding a machine-learning algorithm thousands and thousands of essays, there’s a good chance of replacing human feedback on essays with AI systems. This would help teachers to evaluate based on chatbot scores reducing the work to manually cover the whole essay with only important parts shown to evaluate out of the whole essay. NLP has a big role to play her.
2. Spaced Interval Learning
Repeating old lessons right when you are about to forget them is an optimal learning super-hack. It’s called The Spacing Effect. Instead of students studying intensely before finals only to forget everything a few weeks later, schools and universities should aim for more lasting knowledge retention using this method. Chattodo Chatbot would give notifications to things which should be revised on regular basis on historical completed trainings or study. Sadly, findings like the spacing effect have had a small impact on the educational system, which lives up to its reputation of being a sector of slow adoption of technology and innovation. Which the chattodo bot will bring about the change using this technique.
3. Conversational Course Assessments & Student Ratings
Using a chatbot to collect feedback is the ultimate compromise between a qualitative and a quantitative research method. As teachers are normally way too busy to collect qualitative feedback from each student, an end-course survey is often used.
The Chattodo chatbot can collect opinions through a conversational interface with the same advantages as a ‘real’ interview but with a fraction of the required work. The conversation can be tailored according to the responses and personality of the student, ask follow-up questions, and find out the reason behind opinions. It’s also possible to filter out personal insults and foul language, which are sometimes present in teacher ratings.
Other than being a compelling option to surveys and with more qualitative data, a chatbot brings many other advantages for teachers who seek to improve efficiency in teaching. By involving more data sources such as self-assessment, grades, peer feedback, and the latest scientific findings on how to teach effectively, it’s possible to form a more nuanced picture of teaching performance. Comparing the data to that of other teachers around the world should make it possible for the system to suggest new and powerful ways to improve teaching and share findings throughout the teacher’s community.
4. AI Powered Learning
The current educational system can, a bit maliciously, be described as a factory-line where the end-goal is to produce competent students to fill employee needs. The factory expects the same raw material (students), the same response to treatment (lessons) and the same result in the same time frame.
As human beings are complex beyond the reach of even the most advanced science, the factory approach is not ideal when it comes to transferring knowledge to a diversified new generation.
Chattodo plans to exploring a new take on the educational model. A student-centered system where student’s own personality and interest is the most decisive factor when it comes to curriculum configuration.
The content adapts to individual learning pace and can present gradually harder problems to accelerate learning as the student comprehend more and more. This way, both fast and slow learners can keep going at their own pace without being discouraged by other students. It’s also possible for an AI-driven curriculum to foresee future trouble areas and present more problems related to it in order to prevent future struggles. The chatbot will present topics once it recognizes the
5. Todo Completion Tracking
The core or Chattodo is todo assignment and todo delegations which can be done by making any chat message a todo. The chatbot would keep track of all the todoes and will prioritize the todos that the user marks as important. It will give information related to a todo by analyzing the todo using NLP to help gain information pertaining to the todo.
6. Conversational Topic Tracking
It sometimes gets difficult to assure that a particular skill has been learnt to completion either on a beginner or expert level. The chatbot would listen to the chat about a particular topic and keep track of the tasks been completed to related topic. The bot will compare this progress with the progress path made by listen to a similar topic conversation on the same line between many different users. With this it would give the student an indicator the progress or tasks required to completely learn the skill. Let us say we are talking on a topic of “Cooking Indian dishes”. The job of the chatbot is to make it easier for us so that we become better at Cooking. So the bot will look at other’s experience about Cooking Indian dishes and help us to get better by suggesting.
Projects Currently in the Market:
Hubert.ai: An AI-driven course evaluation/ teacher improvement system. Hubert is a chatbot system designed to make feedback gathering effortless every student can share their opinion in a personal and engaging way. This ensures highly qualitative answers without time-consuming work. When feedback has been collected, the results are automatically managed. You’re presented with a full overview along with an in-depth analysis containing actionable improvement opportunities.
Watson, the Teacher Assistant: At the Georgia Institute of Technology, students were charmed by the new teachers assistant, Jill Watson, who managed to respond to student inquiries in a fast and accurate way. What the students didn’t know was that Ms. Watson’s true identity actually was a computer and powered by IBMs AI-system with the same name. Computer Science Professor Ashok Goel fed Watson more than 40.000 forum posts to get the system up and running. Answering common questions is a perfect application for a chatbot and a much more interactive approach than using an FAQ-tab. After getting huge publicity, Jill Watson is spreading her wings and is now being implemented in universities across the globe. One of the latest to be added to the list is BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway.
The Chatbot Campus Genie: At the Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, development is in full swing to complete the first ever chatbot campus genie. Just like in the case of the AI teacher assistant, the intelligence behind it comes from IBM’s supercomputer system, Watson. Once operational, the Deakin genie will be able to answer questions related to everything a student needs to know about life on campus. How to find the next lecture hall, how to apply for next semester’s class, how to submit assignments, where to find parking or where a counselor can be reached are all questions that can be handled by the genie. When new students swarm the campus, they have similar questions every year which makes for a perfect application of a chatbot. William Confalonieri is the driving force behind the genie-project and the CIO at Deakins University.
Summit Learning project: The project that involves Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, Facebook and Summit public school, uses bots for basic lecturing. The idea is that chatbots can serve as the virtual advisers, who will adapt their work and curriculum to the students’ abilities. This way, the students can follow their own learning pace. In the Summit Learning project, chatbots serve as vertical tutors. They engage in a dialogue with each student and determine the areas where they are falling behind. Then, chatbots use this data to compose an entirely personalized learning program that focuses on troubling subjects. Their job is also to follow the students’ advancement from the first to the last lesson, check their assumptions, and guide them through the curriculum.
Gojimo Tutor or Third Space Learning: AI and bots will not eliminate human teachers but they will support their work. For example, apply Gojimo Tutor or Third Space Learning. Gojimo works through messaging: learners send questions and the system helps to find a coach and understand the concept. It enables students to be more self-directed and independent. Third Space Learning is one-to-one online maths tutoring. This is a global project that has already helped 6,000 students from England. It is aimed to provide users with real-time feedback. Artificial intelligence will inform teachers that learners stuck at some point. Also, Mr. Hooper and his team record teaching to update and refine it.
SuperMemo App: Polish inventor Piotr Wozniak has come up with a learning app built around the spacing effect. This app keeps track of what you learn and when you learn it. By incorporating artificial intelligence, the app is able to learn when you are most likely to forget information and remind you to repeat it. It only takes a couple of repetitions to make sure the information sticks for years to come.
https://sso.supermemo.com/login?layout=smcom&locale=en&service=https://app.supermemo.com