Disclaimer: This project idea is the intellectual property of the HighEdTech Team.
Team: HighEdTech
Team Members: Claudia Duran Garcia, Mathiu Perez Rodriguez, Nathaniel Levitan, & Valentina Rappa, City College of New York
Link to the Business Case Analysis.
Overview of the Project – In 2013, CUNY reported that 27.3% of first-time undergraduate students enrolled in full-time baccalaureate programs left the CUNY system after three years following their entry date without completing a baccalaureate program. These could be a reflection of the lack of institution’s learning resources, such as the number of tutors available, tutor scheduling, office hours, library operating hours, and availability of online resources. In a scenario like this, project HighEd-Tech seeks to help students by fostering a deeper understanding of the material being taught and intervening in situations where students are falling behind.
Problem – With a view to guide students lagging behind, CUNY has implemented many assignment websites for general classes, such as MyMathLab by Pearson, WebAssign for Calculus and similar services for Physics and Chemistry. It has also targeted this problem by investing on more advisors, and improving tutoring centers on campus. Nevertheless, these issues persist. These websites are often not appealing to the student. Concepts and problem-approach methods are constrained by the instructor’s syllabus and teaching style. In the same way, advisors and tutoring centers are crowded, leaving students waiting for extensive periods of time to be helped.
Approach to address the problem – Student-learning can be greatly improved by increasing classroom involvement, providing more individual-scale attention and giving students assistance at their fingertips using our feedback learning system, HighEd-Tech. HighEd-Tech ventures to integrate IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence-based platform with machine learning techniques to develop an online homework platform enabled through CUNY Blackboard, to provide real-time feedback to open response math problems.
Benefits and Impacts – An AI-based “tutor” that can analyze gaps in learning and use that information to provide highly targeted material to improve students’ understanding can be very valuable for disadvantaged students.