GUEST PODCAST: Ed-Technical Season 1 Episode 4
Join two former teachers – Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel – for the Ed-Technical podcast series about AI in education.
Each episode, guest hosted on BOLD, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions such as “How does AI really help students and teachers?”, “What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation?” and “When we say ‘AI’, what are we actually talking about?”
In the fourth episode of this series, Libby and Owen talk to John Roberts, co-founder and Director of Product and Engineering at Oak National Academy. Oak was originally created as an online classroom in 2020 as a rapid response to the coronavirus outbreak. They have delivered over 150 million lessons in their online classroom. They have now become a new national body supporting curriculum and providing free resources to teachers of 4- to 16-year-olds in the United Kingdom.
Oak National Academy recently launched a couple of AI experiments (a quiz designer and lesson planner) designed to help teachers save time. John talks us through the experience of starting Oak during the pandemic, what potential he sees for AI to help save teachers time, his thoughts on AI generating quality content, and how they’re optimising base large language models for education (and find out more about retrieval augmented generation or RAG).
There’s also some good bonus content from John (an ex-physics teacher) on what a negative displacement in a longitudinal wave indicates…
Guests and resources
- TES profile on John Roberts
- Information on Oak’s AI experiments
- Information about Oak’s approach to open government licensing
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What you didn’t cover is the trick issue of whether & how you mix expert proprietary content with LLMs. technology.ai already allows this & has examples using some Wiley content (any expert content can be added by users). The issue of whether UK schools are a viable market for AI & investing in AI edtech is another challenge that doesn’t apply to Oak. John also skated around the issue of shatter the AI edtech sold to schools from UK companies over the last decade is really AI? The highest profile ‘startup’ (11 years old actually) used to claim their AI could even predict autism with 96% accuracy. My view is that these sorts of widely exaggerated claims, generally without a scintilla of evidence, have made schools quite wary of AI black box solutions and this has had a negative impact on AI edtech investment & innovation in the UK.