181 - Guests: Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, AI Teacher Creators, part 2
Dec 4, 2023
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Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya discuss their mission to upskill underserved students globally with their AI teacher Beatrice. They explore the evolution of teaching and learning, the potential of teddy bear interactions, challenges in developing the platform, and alternative teaching approaches.
Teaching and Learning 3.0, the current stage of education, is characterized by conversational AI tutors that provide both interactivity and accessibility, revolutionizing personalized learning.
Beatrice, the AI teacher for older learners, aims to create a warm, competent, and human-like teacher-student relationship while utilizing AI to assist with content creation, lesson planning, and assessment.
Deep dives
Teaching and Learning 3.0: The Evolution of Education
The podcast explores the evolution of education, from traditional teaching (Teaching and Learning 1.0) to digital teaching (Teaching and Learning 2.0) and finally to the current stage of conversational AI tutors and generative AI platforms (Teaching and Learning 3.0). Traditional teaching is interactive but not accessible to all, while digital teaching offers more accessibility but lacks interactivity. The introduction of conversational AI tutors provides both interactivity and accessibility, revolutionizing education and creating lifelong teachers for personalized learning.
The Role of Digital Teachers: Teddy and Beatrice
The podcast discusses two digital teachers, Teddy and Beatrice. Teddy is designed for elementary school children and focuses on maintaining their attention and fostering group interaction. Children find Teddy engaging and enjoy its game-like features. Beatrice, on the other hand, caters to older learners and offers personalized, one-to-one interactions. Beatrice aims to create a warm, competent, and human-like teacher-student relationship, while also utilizing AI to assist with content creation, lesson planning, and assessment.
Overcoming Challenges and Looking Towards the Future
The episode highlights the challenges faced in developing AI-based educational platforms, such as cloud costs and computing power. However, the overall goal is to create a better and more human-like relationship between AI teachers and learners. The team behind the platforms conducts user-centered design research, involving user testing and gathering feedback to continuously improve the user experience. While group learning and deeper engagement are important considerations, the current focus is on perfecting one-to-one interactions. The future vision includes incorporating multimodal capabilities and expanding AI teaching to different age groups and specialized subjects.
There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.
Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.
In the conclusion of the interview they describe how the AI teachers work, and their definitions of Teaching and Learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.