EDYou Learning Studio

EDYou is a website where teachers and other professionals can index learning resources and assessment materials such as multiple choice or validated free response questions to concepts in our index. Users can access these resources through targeted search or within programs which contain a predefined list of concepts. In these experiences users can engage in a continuous process of self-assessment and review to supplement traditional learning and serve as a long term point of continuity throughout transitions in their educational career. Although the current focus is K - 12 education, this approach can be expanded beyond K - 12 ro encompass any assessment driven qualification with sufficient online resources.

EDYou’s crowdsourcing approach leverages a large index of educational materials to optimize learning and assessment resources for individuals based on their current skill level, interests, aptitude, and cultural background. EDYou uses user engagement and performance data as well as demographic data about the users and content moderators and metadata about the learning resources to develop individual learning profiles and improve recommendations through similarities to other users over time. With continued use, user ratings of content, engagement data, and results of performance assessments will provide sources of reinforcement learning for the algorithms that drive content recommendations. 

This approach provides numerous benefits to both students and teachers.

For teachers, EDYou provides:

• A bank of content and assessment resources for each concept within their curriculum.

• A tool for students to practice concept mastery repeatedly with automated scoring that does not require teacher intervention.

• Reporting on concept mastery at the individual and class level to guide teacher instructional choices.

• A tool for differentiating instruction to align with the needs and personal interests of each student.

• Access to reports to evaluate content and assessment resource style, form, and other characteristics that generate the best learning outcomes for each concept.

For students, EDYou provides:

• Targeted learning experiences based on students’ existing concept mastery, personal interests, and content preferences that contextualizes information in a way that is personally meaningful and engaging.

• Unlimited opportunity for practice and review to guide their learning without punitive consequences.

• Cumulative assessment and review opportunities to ensure retention of learning from year to year.

• A continuous record of learning and achievement.

• Equal access to a broad range of subject matter across all school settings and exposure to a wide variety of applications through the content and assessment resource banks

At scale, EDYou creates a network for educators and professionals to share their knowledge by curating learning and assessment resources and, through user data, determine which resources are most effective in driving long term retention for particular groups of learners.

Please visit this link to create a free account for access to the prototype: https://edyou.org/log-in

Traditional education approaches are difficult to personalize because of the time and expense required to develop and deliver integrated curricula, resulting in a system that is optimized to a mythical “average” learner to ensure economic-viability by reaching a suitably broad audience, instead of optimizing for individuals. Digital learning products made significant improvements in the delivery of content, improving accessibility, adapting to individual learning pace, and reducing cost of delivery, but largely digitized the traditional educational experience without paradigmatically redesigning educational opportunities around the true constraints of digital delivery, which is far less restrictive than in-person educational modalities.

EDYou aims to be the vehicle that enables wholesale transformation of the learning process. The first step in this process is understanding individual learning differences and preferences to optimize assessment and education at the individual level.

EDYou will impact priority K-8 learners by:

• Transforming assessment into a proactive and cyclical tool that helps teachers and students identify learning gaps and personalized content for closing those gaps.

• Removing barriers to education based on local resource constraints, providing equal access to a diverse range of subjects regardless of physical location.

• Increasing exposure to a wide variety of concepts via the assessment and content resources, which will help equalize student opportunity to discover and develop interests and aptitudes that may influence future aspirations (e.g. marine biology in Nebraska).

• Helping students develop their sense of identity as a learner through exposure to a broad array of educators, professionals, and content creators, increasing the chances that all students will find role models they resonate with and are inspired by.

• Engaging students more fully in the learning process by tailoring assessments and learning experiences to their individual competency level, personal interests, and academic identity.

• Exposing students to a broader set of applications for each concept through assessment resources and educational content, increasing the likelihood that students internalize the relevance of acquired knowledge to future goals.

• Allowing students to request concepts or programs and suggest content allows them to contribute to improving educational opportunities, provide valuable data that can help educators tailor assessments and teaching to student interests, and identify new subject areas students believe they need basic knowledge in for success in the modern world.

• Reducing the burden of administrative time for assessment, allowing teachers to devote more time to instruction and mentoring.

• Improving access to aggregated data that will provide valuable insight to education professionals and drive continuous improvement in curriculum development, pedagogy and assessment practices, including the development of effective counter-canons.

EDYou’s Founder, Rees Horton, will serve as the team lead for the MIT Solve project. He currently serves as EDYou’s CEO and CTO and, though his technical skills are self-taught, he coded 100% of EDYou’s prototype. His formal background is in mathematical analysis and law with degrees in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Georgia and a JD from Duke University, School of Law. Before starting EDYou he worked directly under the General Counsel of DUMAC designing legal analytics on private equity agreements using a variety of data science techniques, including AI and machine learning. He also conducted research on the legal risks of generative adversarial networks under existing intellectual property and evidentiary doctrine. His combination of data science, programming, and legal expertise is essential for navigating the copyright, data architecture, and algorithmic challenges associated with generating cohesive, personalized educational experiences from third party content.

EDYou’s Co-Founder, Gita Vatave, is a female technology executive and former educator. She has deep experience in developing strategic partnerships to bring robust, cost-effective product solutions to market. In addition, she has experience in designing engaging, user-friendly technical solutions, with particular experience reaching marginalized populations such as older adults (who may lack technology infrastructure and experience) and low-income minority populations.

As an educator, Gita taught both Science and English, including classes for English language learners. She has a long-standing interest in education stemming from her role as a researcher on the landmark Beginning School Study that looked at gender differences in math and science achievement. As a health professional, she worked on health education campaigns for migrant workers, strategies for evaluating and disseminating best practices for reducing minority male violence and reducing social barriers to effective preventative care and health promotion.

The prototype consists of a web application with a user interface for each of three learning modalities, moderator forms for adding concepts, assessment resources and YouTube videos to the index, and a working index populated with K-12 concepts and some associated resources. Testing with the prototype established the viability of this learning approach and that crowdsourcing content into the index using forms was workable, but testing on larger populations is required to fine tune the algorithm methodology, content delivery features, and crowdsourcing mechanics.

Available to anyone in the United States but current active users are located in CA, GA, TX, and Washington, DC.

EDYou’s design and architecture support 3 key innovations in learning assessment and the use of assessment data to support further learning.

1. EDYou can be scaled to be a lifelong learning solution, creating a longitudinal record of concept-based learning and mastery. This creates several unique advantages for both learner and teacher:

   1. It enables repetition across students' entire continuum of learning rather than within the context of a single grade or course.

   2. Artificial silos between grades or subjects are eliminated. Teachers can easily access data related to student achievement at the concept level from previous years or other subject areas and identify pre-requisite skills students may have failed to demonstrate. 

   3. EDYou provides continuity in the learning process. Learners who haven’t retained knowledge from previous coursework can be directed to earlier learning experiences that led to successful mastery. This type of scaffolding provides crucial support to students who haven’t obtained sufficient content mastery as earlier concepts can always be retested and retrained. Similarly, more advanced students can challenge themselves with more difficult assessments and/or related topics.

2. Enhanced level of personalization may lead to improved retention and engagement. Most e-learning platforms include some level of personalization, but EDYou will eventually personalize learning across 3 key dimensions:

   1. Context personalization of content and assessment resources, including personalization based on interests.

   2. Allowing learners to choose the learning mode, timing of assessment, and content selection.

   3. Assessment methodologies that encourage students to actively generate personalized connections.

3. EDYou’s modular design is inherently upgradable. Advances in AI, updated content, and new assessment methodologies can be integrated quickly without having to rebuild from scratch. Both content and assessment resources are continuously curated and optimized to remain current and reflect best practices.

4. EDYou’s framework can serve a pivot point allowing content from structured curriculum to be unbundled and redeployed alongside content addressing the same underlying concepts, creating competitive forces to drive discovery of which content best serves each stratum of users.
   

Deployment of EDYou in traditional classroom settings has the future potential to transform the role of teachers. Teachers will be able to spend a greater amount of time guiding learning, building study skills, and mentoring rather than serving primarily as subject-matter experts since a diverse body of subject matter experts is available to students within EDYou. Teachers will also be more readily able to differentiate instruction for each student, a practice that they currently lack the tools to support. Differentiation has come to mean teaching the same concept a few different ways, but EDYou enables true differentiation as each student can learn and be assessed through a lens that is personally relevant for them without creating a large administrative burden on the teacher.

The rich repository of user demographic and experience data will help advance knowledge about effective assessment methodologies, pedagogical techniques and engagement drivers. Sharing this data with the educational and professional community will improve the quality of education systems in general, and will result in continuous quality improvement within the resource library and recommendation algorithms used by EDYou.

While our dataset lends itself to additional AI use cases, our core resource recommendation use case is Deep Learning. Specifically, our technology is a Two Tower vector-based Deep Neural Network (DNN). This approach allows for personalized and highly-performant recommendations. Our implementation will rely on third-party text embeddings to vectorize our document sets and may also leverage a devOps suite to monitor model training and deployment. 

Our front-end is developed in React and currently uses Firebase as a backend, though this backend stack will evolve as we grow and our user base scales.

We don’t have independent evidence that our technology will improve learning assessments yet, but the product incorporates key design elements that have been proven effective in other applications.

It’s well documented that YouTube videos and other learning formats can generate learning outcomes similar to traditional learning methods. Furthermore, studies indicate that YouTube is a preferred study aid by the majority of college and high school students. Reasons for this preference include:

• The ability to tailor the educational experience to their specific learning needs, such as preparing for an exam or trying a different instructional approach.

• Manageability of the learning experience: Pausing, skipping, replaying, adjustment of pace.

• Limitations of face-to-face instruction: not understanding instructor, too few examples, inadequate in class practice.

• Availability: diversity of choices in both educator and applications presented, accessibility regardless of location/time of day, access to experts in the field.

EDYou leverages the assessment process to drive learners to curated educational content in a video format that has already been demonstrated to be both effective and well-accepted by learners.

EDYou uses spaced repetition to verify content mastery. Spaced repetition, also called distributed practice, is a time-tested practice with decades of data demonstrating its efficacy. Because EDYou is a longitudinal assessment tool, repetition can occur over days, weeks, months or years, rather than being limited to the concepts in the current grade level or subject category. This provides learners with continuous opportunities to reassess and relearn content, leading to better long term retention. 

EDYou capitalizes on the power of artificial intelligence to personalize the assessment and learning experience across multiple dimensions. The move towards personalization has been more limited in education than in other commercial uses, but early data from the Next Generation Learning Challenge and other published interventions suggests that personalization produces a measurable positive impact on learning outcomes. Business lines with the most advanced personalization models have demonstrated the potential of this approach to increase user engagement by creating a more relevant and enjoyable experience for the user, leading to increased loyalty and lower churn rates. 

Outside education, there are numerous examples that demonstrate efficacy of similar data aggregation approaches in generating high quality recommendations. Effective content curation has a positive effect on consumer sentiment, creating a greater degree of ownership, identity and confidence in the activity.Analysis of consumer attitudes towards subscription services show a preference for services with highly personalized recommendations, such as Netflix, Spotify and StitchFix, over less personalized experiences. 

EDYou is creating a similar, highly personalized recommender system. We expect personalized recommendations to be similarly valuable in the learning and assessment context by:

1. Filtering out low-quality or irrelevant content

2. Providing diverse perspectives

3. Minimizing information overload

4. Simplifying content discovery

5. Organizing progression through assessment and learning experiences

Note: Several citations linked above. A complete list of citations is available upon request.

Each year students enter school with a wide variation in readiness for the planned course of study. These variations result from a combination of factors including unequal environmental conditions and individual personality differences and talents. EDYou’s business model and technical approach are designed to maximize individual opportunities for learning, not equalize content delivery across a body of learners. Maximizing opportunity requires equal exposure to learning opportunities and optimizing individual fit through expanded variety and learner choice.

EDYou is designed to meet the needs of a diverse body or learners by:

• Sourcing content and assessment resources from a diverse body of educators/professionals

• Giving learners agency over their own concept mastery by allowing choice in the assessment and content selection process

• Removing geographic barriers to ensure equal access to all subject matter, giving all students the opportunity to discover talents and aptitude across a wide range of disciplines

• Enabling students to assess their own mastery level and recommending best fit resources to advance learning at their own pace, which helps ensure that future opportunities aren’t cut off if a student learns at a slower pace or discovers interests later in their education career

EDYou’s data model will combine data about learner and moderator characteristics, content metadata, past performance data, content ratings, learner behavior, and engagement to feed the algorithms and optimize delivery of assessment and learning resources. Algorithmically, we plan to embed diversity and inclusiveness into our recommendation process by introducing an additional step which will select the final subset of resources to be displayed to the user based on a combination of similarity score (from the algorithm) and diversity score, derived from resource metadata and data regarding learning outcomes from the resource (and similar resources) across demographic categories. During training and development we likely use a devOps and analysis software to monitor and prevent biases being proxied in latent parameters of the DNNs. Regular reporting on learning outcomes and user engagement will be used to continue to monitor these risks as the algorithm continues to evolve through reinforcement learning. 

We expect EDYou to provide long term benefits to the educational community by providing a rich data source which can be used to identify best practices in assessment and content creation. The same data that is used to optimize delivery of individual learning within EDYou can lift all boats by providing valuable insight and feedback to curriculum developers and educators, particularly those seeking to develop targeted learning or evaluation approaches for segments of the population.

The 2 co-founders are the only 2 full-time staff members. We aren't currently using any contractors but we have used contractors in the past for logo design and marketing purposes.

A rules based version of the product without a robust algorithmic recommender system can be deployed in schools within 2 - 3 months for English-speaking populations. This would allow us to test our delivery mechanisms, crowdsourcing and collect training data to implement the AI.

Additional development would be required to deploy a pilot with the algorithm as the primary recommendation feature.  

We can deploy in Spanish or other languages if we can find partners to help us curate the content. This process can be accomplished quickly because no additional development is needed, so the size of the available moderator community will dictate the timeline for deployment.

EDYou is a web-based solution which is readily accessible anywhere with a computer and internet access, and a cross-platform app will be launched during Summer 2024 for those whose primary access point is smartphones. For learners, EDYou is a free resource, allowing unlimited access to learning across an ever-growing range of concepts and index of educational content and assessment resources. EDYou will generate revenue from schools and other organizations which will receive value not only through student learning, but also in the administrative functions and data access enabled by the platform.

EDYou’s cloud-based architecture is intentionally low cost to operate and update, and its modular index design eliminates many of the factors that make it costly and slow to update other educational tools and curricula. Furthermore, by crowdsourcing from publicly available internet resources which grant usage licenses for embedding, EDYou eliminates all of the costs associated with developing content without disrupting content creators' existing revenue streams.

Participation in the challenge will help EDYou overcome three key barriers to commercialization:

• Form partnerships with educational stakeholders. EDYou leverages the proliferation of freely available resources developed by content creation communities and other educational stakeholders. However, our crowdsourcing model relies on moderators to add structure to these resources, ensuring user access to high-quality, logically organized assessment and learning content. Participation in this challenge could help quickly expand the initial moderator community.

• Gain entry into the K-12 market. As an early-stage startup it will be challenging to gain entry into educational institutions to field test the product. The backing and connections of a world-renowned foundation and educational institution will help open doors and speed the acquisition of a critical mass of users.

• Talent acquisition. As first-time founders, identifying and hiring top talent will be a critical priority. Networking within the innovative community of Solvers will help us identify talent with the right skills and cultural fit. This opportunity may also provide crucial connection points with leaders in advanced information technology fields and the educational research community, allowing us to build a strong network to partner with as we refine our technology and optimization processes.