Education, A.I., and the Web: Interviewing Grockit's Ari Bader-Natal

As part of our ongoing exploration of the intersection of education and technology at The Cram, I caught up with Ari Bader-Natal, who represented Grockit at The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, or AIED, in July. Read below for his email responses to my questions, and click here for my look at the growing market of innovative web test prep start-ups.

The [conference] brings together researchers from a number of different fields (including computer science, education, and psychology) developing and evaluating adaptive software systems that help students learn. I'm by no means a spokesman for the community, but I believe that much of the work in this field is motivated by Benjamin Bloom's 2-Sigma Problem: While expert tutors have been shown to help students learn significantly more effectively (two sigma) than traditional classroom instruction, one-to-one tutoring is considered too expensive to really scale. One goal of AIED research is to build adaptive software systems (which are comparatively inexpensive to scale) that are as effective as personal tutoring. The AIED conference (in my opinion) represents a commitment by researchers and funding agencies around the world to explore if, how, and when adaptive learning systems can step up to this challenge.

We're building a web-based system that helps students help each other. We're working on network-enhanced incarnations of several traditional learning environments: study groups, private tutoring sessions, study halls, and the one-room schoolhouse, to name a few. In each case, the technology that we're building to connect students is designed to also motivate, tailor, or scaffold learning. Game dynamics motivate students to study more and to help one another along, Diagnostics+Quests offer students individually-targeted study sessions, and Custom Games and Custom Reviews let students focus on only those areas that they choose. New projects are always in the works. Nothing specific to announce right now, but I remain interested in new ways to synthesize the computer-intelligence and collaborative-intelligence aspects of our system.

Much research in the field is focused on longer-term projects based on classroom pilot studies, but there are a growing number of systems available -- many free on the web -- that a teacher can incorporate into lesson plans or homework assignments (including Andes, Assistments, and Spellbee, to name a few.) Some systems are sufficiently engaging to appeal to learners outside of classroom requirements (Grockit!) I think you will start to see more of these projects figure out how to leverage the connective potential of the internet and the motivational potential of games. But perhaps that's just my bias. Massively multiplayer online games have been an inspiration at Grockit from Day 1.

I'm not one for predictions, but I'll give it a shot. I think the AIED systems of the future will be less about teaching directly, and more about providing guidance: when and how a student would benefit from working with someone else (perhaps a teacher, tutor, or peer.) When I get stuck solving a particular type of problem, who (that's online and available) can best help me understand it? A good system will have predicted the frustrating challenge, and will have already lined up the person best-suited to explaining it to me in a way that I will understand. After I've demonstrated that I mastered the necessary skills, who can I then explain it to, both to help them and to clarify it for myself? A good system will be able to seamlessly coordinate this process. Through these interactions, the system will unobtrusively be learning more about me -- both as a learner and as a peer-tutor -- in order to improve with time.