In the fourth episode of this series, Libby and Owen talk to John Roberts, co-founder and Director of Product and Engineering at Oak National Academy. Oak was originally created as an online classroom in 2020 as a rapid response to the coronavirus outbreak. They have delivered over 150 million lessons in their online classroom. They have now become a new national body supporting curriculum and providing free resources to teachers of 4- to 16-year-olds in England.

Oak National Academy recently launched a couple of AI experiments (a quiz designer and lesson planner) designed to help teachers save time. John talks us through the experience of starting Oak during the pandemic, what potential he sees for AI to help save teacher’s time, his thoughts on AI generating quality content, and how they’re optimising base large language models for education (and find out more about retrieval augmented generation or RAG).

There’s also some good bonus content from John (an ex-physics teacher) on what a negative displacement in a longitudinal wave indicates...

Guests and resources

• TES profile on John Roberts 
• Information on Oak’s AI experiments
• Information about Oak’s approach to open government licensing 

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Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design