As discussed in last month’s newsletter, Elevate has spent the last few years seeking out and making investments in a range of companies that are not only on the cutting edge of educational technology, but whose technology can be used in the classroom to engage students in concepts that were otherwise boring or irrelevant. Each month in Disrupting the Classroom we will introduce you to one of the companies in our portfolio, and our feature company for March is TailorEd.
Meet TailorEd
As discussed last month, recent research in Australia by the Grattan Institute shows that 60% of Australian high school students are disengaged at any point in time. Disengagement is cited as one of the key causes of academic underperformance and is also one of the biggest reasons that teachers leave the industry. This creates massive costs for the education system as a whole. One of the biggest reasons that students become disengaged is that all students do the exact same work regardless of their ability levels, so that work is either too hard for many students (to the point that they can’t understand it and give up), or too easy (to the point that students lose interest). As one of our clients put it: “I teach Year 8 maths and have 30 students in my class whose ability levels go from Year 4 to Year 10. Trying to engage them all with the exact same work is simply impossible."
Enter TailorEd. TailorEd has developed a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to:
* Identify a student’s competency levels for any particular skill or content area;
* Identify a student’s preferred learning styles; (for example, are they communicative and like to learn through discussion with others? Or do they prefer to work alone using video or text-based prompts?)
After this occurs, they match the student to their ideal content for their class, so that students end up doing work that is not only at just the right difficulty level for them, but which also fits their preferred mode of learning. As any teacher will tell you, developing lesson plans and finding engaging content is already massively time-consuming.
Trying to create bespoke plans with bespoke content for 30 different students is simply too time-consuming to be possible without the aid of technology.
Why are Elevate involved with TailorEd?
TailorEd has one of the most impressive founding teams that we have met in recent years. Beyond being an all-female founding team, which is something of a rarity in tech, its founders Maayan and Yael both have computer science backgrounds specializing in AI. They have worked in personalization at some of tech’s biggest companies, such as Google and Edmodo. Even more importantly, Maayan and Yael both have Masters in Education from Stanford, which is globally one of the top universities for education (and tech). Maayan and Yael have harnessed this unique tech/education background to build the product from the classroom up, so that the product is in tune with the needs of students and teachers rather than being forced down on them.
The UK team are lucky enough to have Maayan and Yael hosting a presentation at our upcoming Client Conference about how schools and teachers can harness AI and ML in the classroom to increase engagement. We look forward to helping TailorEd grow into UK schools over the coming months.
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