There is no doubt interest is soaring in the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance education. Many conversations focus on pupils and how AI could personalise studying or provide digital one-to-one tutoring.
Less has been said, though, about how it might help teachers develop resources and save time. This is the area where Oak National Academy already works, with thousands of teachers using our resources every week to plan lessons, so it was the natural place for us to start experimenting.
We faced the same problem as everyone else when working with generative AI tools: the results are not always accurate enough and the content they generate is not always safe enough for classroom use.
This is because generative AI draws on the general internet. Its training is vast and comprehensive but it’s riddled with inaccuracies, there are in-built biases and parts of it are unsafe for children.
So Oak has been exploring how we can improve this. Not just for our own AI experiments but for everyone.
AI tools for teachers
1. Accurate and safe resources
First, we can provide a high-quality and safe set of education resources for AI to draw from and train on. Earlier this month we started to roll out our new curriculum and teaching resources, which will eventually cover the entire national curriculum for England.
They are developed by teachers and have gone through many layers of quality assurance.
All of these resources will be on an open government licence, which means not just Oak but any school, publisher or AI developer can use them as a launchpad for their AI products, safe in the knowledge the content is accurate and safe.
We are also making sure teachers are continually feeding back on how to improve these resources, and their suggestions are acted on.
2. AI tools for quizzes and lesson plans
Secondly, we’ve been experimenting to see if we can develop AI tools to help teachers create and develop their lessons.
The first tool we have built is a quiz generator. It produces questions and high-quality “distractors” (wrong answers) for multiple-choice questions, a central part of many lessons and time-consuming to create.
We released it earlier this month and enlisted the help of teachers to try it out to see if it meets classroom standards. They created over 4,000 quizzes and their feedback has helped us improve the tool as we go along.
We’ve just launched a second tool where AI helps to generate lesson plans. That is showing good potential, too, with 1,000 lesson plans created by teachers in less than two days.
It can never be a substitute for highly skilled teachers planning lessons, but it can make this work more effective as well as more efficient.
Teachers can find both at Oak’s AI tools for teachers and have a go at creating quizzes and lesson plans.
Helping schools to innovate with AI
In both cases we’ve made sure that teachers are always in charge, that there is “a human in the loop”. All outputs generated can be edited and overridden by teachers, making any necessary changes and adaptations. There is simply no prospect that these tools could replace teachers’ professional judgement.
We also use moderation tools to help ensure that the content that is AI-generated is suitable for the age group and educational context. It’s early days and there’s lots we can do to improve the quality and build upon the feedback we’ve received.
Today the Department for Education has announced more investment in this work to support teachers’ workload.
It will mean that every teacher in England is set to be benefit from new resources powered by AI, for free. We’ll further improve what we offer, responding to teachers’ feedback about what will help them the most.
But we know that the great potential in education AI is not just what Oak will do. It’s in the hundreds of innovations that haven’t even been thought of yet.
So, vitally, our new investment will also seek to help others - schools, trusts, publishers and edtech developers. We’ll provide a safe, high-quality body of educational content so innovators in other organisations can build their own AI tools from it.
The future possibilities here are endless, from AI revision helpers to teacher training and feedback tools.
The aim is clear: to help a wide range of other organisations to create AI-powered tools that teachers have trust and confidence in, that save them time, and that allow them to focus more on teaching and supporting pupils.
That’s a big win for us all.
John Roberts is director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy
