AI powered revision for online tutoring!

Memory is a fickle beast. The scientific literature is filled with examples of people mis-remembering key events or conjuring false memories when prompted. Clearly, memory is key in the context of tutoring, teaching and learning. It’s important for students to be able to recall what they covered during their tutoring sessions. That of course is one of the key strengths of online tutoring. Rather than having to rely on memory along, students can revise any of their sessions at anytime.

That only solves part of the problem though. How are students supposed to remember which session they covered which topic in? With an average of over 4000 words spoken in an hour session, it can be difficult to remember exactly when radicals, routers or rhetoric were covered. But what if it was possible to automatically tag every session with it’s most spoken words? Enter AI Synopsis – see it in action in your revision library.

By harnessing the increasing power of natural language processing, we’re able to identify the key words in a session, whilst eliminating hundreds of standard words like: yeah, yes, no, um, thing etc. We then generate a word cloud with each word sized according to the number of times it was spoken in that session. The result is a graphic that a glance tells you what was covered in that session: from subject down to topic. The examples below show how well the AI Synopsis maps to the notebook from the session.

The top shows the AI Synopsis from a session, the bottom a page taken from that session

We’ve always believed that online tutoring is about more than just substitution. It’s about improvement – what can we do to enrich the experience online that simply isn’t possible offline? AI Synopsis plus Smart Playback is the clearest improvement yet. No longer do students have to rely on unreliable memory. Instead, they can easily scan all of their online tutoring sessions to identify exactly where they discussed something and jump straight in to revise that session. If the testimonial below is anything to go by, it appears students are already beginning to appreciate the benefits this offers.