John Roberts

AI must fit education’s needs, not the other way round Oak’s interim CEO outlines why AI must be used within the context of three core pillars of learning - but, if used correctly, can have huge benefits

📚❇️ Curriculum must be at the heart of AI innovation - thoughts from our interim CEO John Roberts 📚❇️

Read in @tes, and check out 🧵 for a preview:

As I end my time at Oak, we’ve achieved a lot but there’s still a lot to do.

I wish Oak’s new interim CEO @johnrobeds.bsky.social, the team and the wider partnership the best as they continue this work and thank them and everyone who has used Oak and helped out on this rollercoaster ride!

📣 John Roberts @johnrobeds.bsky.social has been announced as our new interim CEO. He’ll take on the role from Matt Hood @matthewhood.bsky.social, who has led Oak for the last five years, when he steps down at the end of March.

Very kind! Thanks Josh.

Oak AI Experiments Oak AI experiments offers some experimental generative AI tools designed for and freely available to teachers. We are actively looking for your feedback to refine and optimise these tools, making them...

💭 You know your pupils best, so think of us as your starting point. All our resources can be adapted to your class, location or approach. And using our intuitive AI tools, you can tailor anything – or create something new – in minutes.

Meet Aila, our AI lesson assistant: oaknat.uk/3E5GcYO

📚Get to know our maths curriculum! 

All our curriculum plans come with an explainer, to help you confidently describe why you teach what you teach. 

For maths, that includes questions like these!

There’s even a @teachertapp.bsky.social citation in there!

GitHub - oaknational/oak-ai-autoeval-tools: Oak National Academy's AI Auto Eval tools provide LLM as a judge evaluation on lesson plans and resources Oak National Academy's AI Auto Eval tools provide LLM as a judge evaluation on lesson plans and resources - oaknational/oak-ai-autoeval-tools

And access the code and tools used on @github.com

github.com/oaknational/...

Auto-Evaluation: A Critical Measure in Driving Improvements in Quality and Safety of AI-Generated Lesson Resources Analysing AI-produced content quickly and efficiently with a focus on “quality” and “safety”.

You can read more the paper at:

aiopeneducation.pubpub.org/pub/i36sncz8/

These findings have been used to improve the quality of Oak’s AI Lesson Assistant, Aila in systematic and evidenced ways.

The evaluation tools used to do this have been openly licensed so that others can replicate the methodology and build their own benchmarks to ensure quality.

It’s something that I hope the sector takes seriously in the new AI assisted world.

We have;

• evaluated ~5000 ai generated lessons across 5 subjects and 24 quality benchmarks
• compared the AI evaluations to expert teacher evaluations

The paper focussed on the quality of multiple choice questions (MCQs)

This is something that we’ve been looking at carefully, particularly as the use of AI products in education proliferates, with little benchmarking on pedagogical quality available.

💡At @oaknational.bsky.social we’ve recently published a research paper with MIT Open Learning.

Ensuring AI-generated lesson content is high-quality and pedagogically sound is a challenge, and as educators, we must ensure that the content we use in the classroom is trustworthy.

AI is making headlines once again, and Teacher Tapp has the latest data! 🤖

69% of teachers have used AI for school work at some point, with 31% having done so just last week!

I’m just a fun guy

Very efficiently packed. Not mushroom left in there.

Have you ever used docs.new, slides.new or even sheets.new?

Well, if you’re a teacher, now you have lessons.new 🎉

You can then try Aila against these parameters, and see how it performs.

lessons.new

Let us know if you have any thoughts, or any prompt improvements. We can test them!

And then, if you're a little more technical, and want to inspect the actual prompt, you'll find it in Oak's GitHub. The link below, is to one of the main prompts, but it's broken down into multiple parts, so worth navigating around the file structure.

github.com/oaknational/...

The pedagogical thinking behind Aila, our AI lesson planning tool | Oak National Academy Ensuring pedagogical integrity has been a priority when creating our new AI lesson planning assistant, Aila. Find out why we built Aila, the research we used to inform its design and how we have impro...

Firstly, the blog on the pedagogical thinking where we explain the curriculum principles, and the research baked in.

www.thenational.academy/blog/the-ped...

💡 Do you want to know more about the pedagogical thinking behind @OakNational's new AI assistant, Aila, and how that's baked into the prompting that drives the LLM to generate lesson content and resources?

👀 Then there's two places to look:

Thanks Eylan. Maths is one of the trickier subjects to do really well here, but we’ll do some subject by subject improvements soon, including Maths as a priority.

Can we give teachers their Sunday nights back?

We’ve just released Oak National Academy’s new AI lesson assistant, Aila.

Helping build lessons and resources, without removing the teacher from the process.

It’s free for teachers to use in the UK.

Give it a go: lessons.new

It’s not just pasta; coffee, gelato, pizza. They do many of the things that are easy to do average, exceptionally. And the red wine is exceptional too, but don’t say that to the French.

1.5-Pints Technical Report: Pretraining in Days, Not Months --... This paper presents a compute-efficient approach to pre-training a Language Model-the "1.5-Pints"-in only 9 days, while outperforming state-of-the-art models as an instruction-following...

Some recent research suggests quality over quantity is important for education datasets. For example: arxiv.org/abs/2408.03506

In France, Peanut Butter is in the “British” section of the supermarket. Always has been.

Helping teachers one AI experiment at a time – BOLD Can AI help teachers save time and generate quality content for the classroom?

🎧 I recently spoke to the Ed-technical podcast about Oak National Academy and our AI experiments.

We discuss how to optimise existing LLMs for quality in education use, subjects where that can be more challenging, and techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation that can be used to good effect.

Helping teachers one AI experiment at a time – BOLD Can AI help teachers save time and generate quality content for the classroom?

🎧 I recently spoke to the Ed-technical podcast about Oak National Academy and our AI experiments.

We discuss how to optimise existing LLMs for quality in education use, subjects where that can be more challenging, and techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation that can be used to good effect.

Blue sky indeed