Pairing High Quality Content with latest technologies

 Pairing High Quality Content with latest technologies

Context :

Geometry lesson from slicing pizza ,,,,,,,,, TOI ………. 10 Nov 2024

Extract :

The teacher, called Flexi, is not human but an AI tool developed by US-based CK-12 Foundation, which describes its mission as ‘enabling every student to learn in their own way’. Neeru Khosla, co-founder of CK-12 and wife of Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, says: “Each student has a different pace of learning, different interests and different goals. Limits of time and resources make it challenging for educators to treat individuals as student. We pair high-quality content with latest technologies to equip students, teachers and parents with everything they need — for free.”
Flexi is the foundation’s latest of many initiatives, which include FlexBooks — customisable and interactive textbooks — and Adaptive Practice, which tailors exercises to a student’s skill level. Flexi’s use of generative AI (gen AI) enables it to draw from CK-12’s resources and provide a personalised learning experience.
Soft-launched in India in Aug this year, Flexi has already been used by nearly a million students in the country. While it’s currently free, there may eventually be a small fee to help cover costs, according to the company. Globally, more than 300 million students, teachers, and parents across 13 countries have used Flexi.

If internet, over time, became a means to democratise knowledge, AI is a tool to personalise knowledge.

Flexi offers option to pick between explanations and answers that are AI-generated, and the ones generated with the help of its own library of books and explainers.

This raises the question: how should an AI tutor like Flexi be used? Is it a replacement for teachers or even schools? The answer is no. And that doesn’t reduce its utility or need.

We’ve long understood that every child learns differently. However, until now, there hasn’t been a practical way to offer personalised teaching for each child, especially in a country like India, with 200 million schoolchildren studying in different languages, and often with parents who lack the money, time or education to support them. AI tutors like Flexi can help schools and teachers blend the advantages of group learning with personalised attention.

The jobs that AI tutors could and should take away is of private tutors. Growth of private tutors and coaching in India mirrors the fall in quality of school education, particularly in public schools. For many poor families these tutors have become a bad-but-expensive supplement to school they can’t do without. Solutions like Flexi could offer a far better substitutes to such tutors at little or no cost.