The classroom is getting a tech upgrade with AI-powered teaching assistants.
Kira Learning, an edtech startup chaired by Google Brain founder, Stanford professor, and AI researcher Andrew Ng has unveiled a new platform that brings AI agents to the classroom.
Kira’s AI agents will carry out the repetitive tasks that often consume hours of teachers’ time. They can help with grading, lesson planning, and analyzing classroom discussions to provide insights on which students are succeeding and which students are struggling. The platform also offers one-on-one tutoring for students.
The company says its goal is to free teachers up to focus on shaping the learning process — as opposed to just conveying information.
As AI becomes more integrated into classrooms, Ng sees this as part of broader transformation of teachers’ roles.
“AI is helping redefine what it means to be a great teacher,” he told Business Insider by email. “Traditionally, we’ve expected teachers to be subject matter experts. But with the workforce changing so rapidly and schools introducing new subjects to prepare students for a rapidly evolving world, what happens when a teacher is asked to teach something entirely new, say, computer science, without years of experience in that field?”
Kira has done this dance before. It launched in 2021 with the aim of helping teachers without a background in computer science teach the subject effectively. At the time, several states were ramping up legislation around making computer science a requirement to graduate from high school.
“Computer science started being introduced into high schools in a way that existed at parity with subjects like English and biology and history,” Andrea Pasinetti, cofounder and CEO of Kira told BI. “Between legislation being passed and it becoming a requirement for students, there was often a window of one, at most two years, and that required training.”
To help teachers quickly get up to speed, Kira developed AI tutors to help teachers master the subjects. It also developed AI teaching assistants to help them in the classroom. In 2023, it partnered with the state of Tennessee — an early adopter of this legislation — to roll out the platform to all public middle schools and high schools in the state. Its since been adopted in hundreds of school districts in states across the country.
Now, the company is expanding its platform to include all subjects. Its new suite of AI agents will help fulfill the company’s ultimate goal of personalizing the learning process — one that Pasinetti said is “almost impossible” today, given how understaffed schools are.
Subverting AI to make learning better
Ng has been at the forefront of AI and education. He’s launched ed-tech companies like Coursera, and DeepLearning.AI — where his latest course “Vibe Coding 101” is available. In an interview with Forbes in 2014, he said that AI has the “potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.”
More than a decade later that notion has taken hold of the corporate world where workers are using AI to eliminate rote tasks like writing emails, analyzing data, and synthesizing research. However, what constitutes “mental drudgery” in the realm of education is less clear, especially as educators — and students — worry that the technology will make skills stagnate.
Kira, in some sense, is subverting the building blocks of generative AI to cut out the busywork and enhance the learning process.
The technology underlying AI is a “fundamentally discursive technology,” Pasinetti said. While the methodical nature can help students work through material through the Socratic method — enabling a back-and-forth dialogue — the issue is that it’s also designed to deliver answers as quickly as possible, Pasinetti said. Several of the most popular generative AI chatbots are also in a race against Google to become the world’s default search engine.
Kira’s aim is to introduce “friction” into students’ conversations with AI at the right stages so that they actually have a productive struggle and learn through the experience, Pasinetti explained.
In practice, that means Kira’s platform can incrementally guide a student through a tough problem by calibrating itself to students’ understanding of the subject.
Kira’s agents use these insights to inform teachers about student capabilities by building knowledge maps to determine what students know and don’t know across a subject.
Schools are getting tech-savvy
Kira’s business model banks on classrooms’ growing embrace of not only AI and data, but tech-enabled learning.
In recent years, schools have begun implementing “adaptive learning technology” which can collect and leverage data on students’ performance, progress, and learning style to tailor the learning experience. This technology aims to increase equity across the classroom and help teachers and students use time more effectively.
That coincides with the widespread adoption of learning management systems during the pandemic. These are software programs that help educators design and manage online learning like Blackboard, Moodle, or TalentLMS. They surged in popularity in 2020 and 2021, according to EducationWeek.
According to EdWeek’s survey of 1,000 school district leaders, principals, and teachers conducted in 2022, only 6% of educators said their school district didn’t use an LMS. Schools can either integrate Kira into their existing LMS or use the platform as a standalone LMS.
Pasinetti said that by adopting Kira, schools can cut down on at least four to five pieces of software — often the most expensive ones.
Kira’s leaders see AI overhauling relationship between students, teachers, and technology — which could lead to more meaningful changes down the road.
“This is a big shift that’s happening, and especially if you don’t have a subject matter expertise, you’re kind of learning alongside your student,” said Jagriti Agrawal, Kira’s cofounder and vice president of artificial intelligence. “I think that that mindset could be a helpful one.”
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