InSight AI

Personalised and optimised education with AI. 

When I started teaching computer science 10 years ago, I quickly realised that students not only progressed at different rates - but always had different starting points and different backgrounds. This combined with standardised testing, creates a ruthless, unfair, sink or swim environment that is toxic for education; students get left behind, they disengage, they drop out. Moreover, the public education systems today are fundamentally born from the industrial age. This woefully, old, slow titanic boat of education is heading straight for a devastating iceberg in the form of accelerating technological displacement. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in 5 to 10 years’ time, yet, as a worried educator today, I’m meant to be preparing our young people for it. The world needs a future-focused scalable solution to make education what it should be: relevant, empowering, inclusive, inspiring and fun.

InSight AI will personalise and optimise education through a virtual trainer called Alex. Alex is a future focused scalable solution to learn skills with the power of AI and machine learning. We can radically accelerate learning for each student with machine learning algorithms, which provide predictive learning paths and helps teachers to easily detect patterns of misunderstanding. Alex - the virtual trainer, learns the learning behaviour of each student, getting better and better at tailoring personalised content with each interaction, thus maximising personal bests and ultimately helping each student to realise their full learning potential. By creating smart, personalised interactions, Alex gives immediate feedback and helps students to understand concepts without waiting on the teacher.

Imagine a system that knows you’re a visual learner with a math phobia. Not only will the software automatically develop a personalised unit to help you master algebra, it’ll preempt difficulties, and maximise engagement and retention for each student.

Too many teachers are stressed and overworked and are just trying to get to the end of the day. Integrating the school curriculum with machine learning requires knowledge and experience on how teachers and students might use an AI personalised virtual trainer with machine learning. 

Teachers and schools with radically reduced stress and paperwork, can then focus on what this software cannot provide -- like collaborative, hands-on, real-world learning.

Personalised learning with AI is in its early infancy. Existing companies are not even scratching the surface for the potential of AI to personalise and optimise learning. I think now is the time for small agile startups to enter this space. I believe there is massive potential to integrate AI into public education systems, and with my experience of what works for both teachers and students, I can make the learning of key concepts in the curriculum easier, so that school can be more collaborative, engaging, hands-on, project-based and fun.

The idea of a personal learning trainer that optimises learning has only started to become possible with recent access to machine learning technologies and the ubiquity of BYOD (bring your own device) in education institutions. Currently, human personalised tutors are the main alternative, but such attention is not cheap. Parents pay upwards of $30,000 per year for private schools (more than twice the average spending per pupil in OECD countries), which only offer slightly smaller class sizes. This option is just simply too costly for poor to average families. 

In the next year, we will release a more established and functional prototype and will advertise to schools to run a free trial for a term with their students, after which we will offer free face-to-face training for their teachers that don't feel comfortable learning from our online tutorials. Initially, our advertising will be personally targeted at specific schools who can provide the feedback we need to ensure the system is robust, optimised and easy to use. We will then ask these schools to provide testimonials for a discounted rate to advertise to new customers.

The K-12 Education Market in the US alone is valued at roughly US $670 billion. For our first release, we will focus on New Zealand and Australian schools. In the next three to five years we intend to expand internationally, firstly to the UK and the US. 

Each student will be charged $1.99 per term and $5.99 for each teacher. If we can successfully integrate the necessary curriculum content students need to cover at a particular level, every public school, student and teacher all over the world can potentially become a customer -- so there is gigantic potential growth there. 

We also want to make sure we can provide for students from a lower socio-economic background, so we will be offering a reduction in fees, or a package of free licenses for these schools. 

We have tested and trialled our free prototype with just over 100 students with 6 teachers and 4 schools in New Zealand. Because I am a fully registered and qualified teacher, I can easily gain access in order to test and trial our software in schools.

We are setting an ambitious goal of having 10,000 students use our software by within the next 12 months. In the next 3 years, over 1 million. 

I am a software developer and computer science teacher with over 10 years of experience teaching students from as young as 3 to 70+. The main bulk of my experience is in within New Zealand schools and universities. 

For our first release, we will provide a limited free trial for ten-weeks or one school term. After that, each student will be charged $1.99 per term and $5.99 for each teacher. 

We will also offer initial training sessions for teachers because we know many have a fear of working with technology. This service will come as an option because not all schools and teachers will want or need it to be face-to-face.

We also want to make sure we can provide for students from a lower socio-economic background, so we will be offering a reduction in fees, or a package of free licenses for these schools. 

I think Solve could be a great place to learn from the best. I'm developing fast, but could go much faster with help from networks and expertise gained from this challenge.

At this stage, I'm more looking for connections and mentorship rather than funding. Predominantly I'd like to connect and network with key people who can help promote and develop this business. At the moment, my networks are limited to New Zealand and it would help tremendously to attract talented people to work for me, and to get leverage for investment. Additionally, the publicity this challenge offers could be a huge help to get InSight AI off the ground.