AI-ALOE

Posted by Meagan Postema on Thursday, July 18, 2024 in Uncategorized.

The National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE) is a research institute funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Accenture through NSF. Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, AI-ALOE will develop an AI-based transformative model for online adult learning. This model simultaneously uses AI for transforming online adult learning and online adult education to transform AI. These innovative transformations are not “just doing things better” but “doing better things” in effectiveness, efficiency, access, scale, and personalization.

AI-ALOE will lead the country and the world in the development of novel AI theories and techniques for enhancing the quality of adult online education. It will foster a research community of computer scientists to conduct responsible use-inspired fundamental research into AI that is grounded in theories of human cognition and learning, supported by evidence from large-scale data, evaluated on a large variety of testbeds, and derived from the scientific process of learning engineering. Together with partners in the higher education and educational technology sector, AI-ALOE will advance online learning to make education more available, affordable, achievable, and ultimately, more equitable.

The Vanderbilt team is developing an intelligent text framework to help guide the next generation of AI enhanced reading materials. Intelligent Texts for Enhanced Language Learning (iTELL) is a computational framework that converts any type of machine-readable text into interactive, intelligent text within a web-app. iTELL is based on theories of reading comprehension and provides opportunities for users to generate knowledge about what they read and watched through constructed responses and summary writing. The constructed responses and summaries are scored automatically by large language models (LLMs) specifically trained to generate scores which inform qualitative feedback to students. iTELL also includes a structured think aloud assistant, which affords users the opportunity to make inferences and relevant elaborations about the text using self-explanations. The feedback from these AI integrations is used in a number of different ways, including to guide learning, correct misconceptions, review missed topics, prepare for upcoming materials, make links between the texts and the real world, and help elaborate on what users have learned.