Online Tutoring Using AI to Improve Student Skills

Eedi is a platform that offers online math tutoring, where users can receive support 7 days a week.

The platform assesses knowledge in a matter of minutes and prioritizes the areas that will improve their grades the fastest, using a dynamic quiz of 10 multiple-choice questions.

The dynamic quiz is powered by artificial intelligence developed by researchers at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK, who specialize in machine learning algorithms that help people make decisions. In this way, the AI uses each answer to predict the likelihood of the student answering each of thousands of other possible questions correctly and then weighs those probabilities to decide which question to ask next to identify knowledge gaps.

"We ask them a question based on their age group and then say, 'Okay, what's the next best question to ask them based on their previous answer,'" said Iris Hulls, Eedi's director of operations. "We learn as much about them as possible to predict growth or comfort issues for them."

The information obtained from the questionnaire resembles a conversation between teacher and students. Cheng Zhang, a principal researcher at Microsoft in the lab, led the development of the machine learning model that drives Eedi's dynamic quiz, commented "If the student doesn't know how much 3 times 7 is, we may want to ask 1 plus 1. We want to adapt the quiz based on the previous answer."

Once the system identifies the weaknesses and strengths of each user, it puts them on the right learning path, helping them to overcome misconceptions and, in turn, reinforcing the teaching received at school.

The success of this platform is the model used in the quiz, called Microsoft's "next best question model", in the case of Eedi, it has thousands of high-quality diagnostic questions specifically vetted and developed to help teachers identify students' misconceptions about mathematical topics.

Craig Barton, co-founder of Eedi and the company's director of education, approached this project based on his experience as an educator. After attending a workshop, he wrote about 50 diagnostic questions and tested them with the students in his class, obtaining satisfactory results. In addition, he is the author of several math books and an active figure in social networks, which allowed him to disseminate this model of questions, and collaborate with Eedi co-founder Simon Woodhead to build an online database with thousands of diagnostic questions for teachers to access for their lesson planning.

The website works without collecting any personal information. "It doesn't need to know a name. It doesn't need to know an e-mail address. It's all about looking at patterns," Woodhead said.

The results are very encouraging, according to their internal data, the platform resolves, during tutorials, 95% of the misconceptions that students have, added to this, the comments as they have achieved greater confidence in front of mathematics.

Not all students learn at the same pace or in the same way and this platform is a personalized option for each student, to learn more visit https://eedi.com/home-parents