What is the name of your organization?
Sense Education
What is the name of your solution?
Learning Path Optimization
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Scalable pedagogically oriented feedback and assessment
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York, NY, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Existing automated educational assessments (e.g. unit tests in programming) give basic right/wrong feedback and have trouble with more complex ideas, such as style. Even less effective are multiple choice assignments, which are sometimes deemed necessary for larger classes. Either way, students receive canned feedback that doesn’t fully capture actual performance. On the other hand, employing non-automated, open-ended assignments is time-consuming and expensive. Educators are often unable to provide helpful, relevant feedback to learners in a timely manner, and there are concerns regarding consistency and accuracy in grading when large teams of TAs are necessarily employed for this manual effort. To address the issues stemming from lack of personal attention, many students turn to accessible LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT), but these systems are designed to give answers rather than develop skills and understanding. Under the current circumstances, there is no good way to maintain the pedagogical integrity of courses (through open-ended assessment) while also ensuring that learners are efficiently and properly assessed and given the real-time guidance needed to promote improved learning outcomes and spur lasting improvement.
What is your solution?
Sense's Learning Path Optimization (LPO) offers a novel form of tutoring that combines the effectiveness of high-quality human feedback with the scalability and accessibility of AI. Our proprietary human-in-the-loop model-building process identifies students' misconceptions and successes, detects them in real time, and matches the submissions with quality, personalized feedback. By giving educators a role in the process, we empower them to take control of the information their students receive and ensure it aligns it with their educational goals and philosophy. In addition, Conceptual Labels are applied to patterns in order to track the progression of students' understanding of higher level concepts across assignments and even courses. In contrast to other options, Sense focuses most on open-ended assignments -- pinpointing each student’s particular errors and successes, offering tutor-quality feedback, and enhancing the grading process for educators in a manner that benefits learners. Sense’s commitment to pedagogy is integral to our ability to improve student performance fundamentally rather than superficially. The knowledge they gain will have an actual, tangible effect in future courses or jobs.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution is designed to most directly help learners in larger higher-education institutions, whether on campus or online. It is even more applicable for individuals who can't operate on a "typical" student schedule, such as adult learners with full time jobs. For example, a large percentage of our users are most active on coursework at nights and on weekends. At the moment, many of these learners are not receiving the education necessary to prepare them for future career success. Instead, because most institutions can't properly service a course with open-ended assignments, these students end up with degrees that represent progression through classes rather than knowledge gained and skills developed. By implementing Sense AI, teachers can most effectively assign open-ended assignments to an increased number of students and provide them with the feedback and assessment necessary for growth -- anytime, anywhere.