Teachers in primary education are using more software on top of student monitoring systems, both from textbooks and standalone. Almost all systems use a dashboard which provides insight into groups of students or individual results. All those different dashboards complicate matters for teachers: how do you combine them all? Some use text, others create graphs. Gathering and interpreting all that data costs too much time and is difficult. The creation of one smart dashboard was the most asked question during the first year of NOLAI.
mAIchart PO and the importance of companies in co-creation
A smart dashboard for teachers is a longstanding wish in education and with the help of AI, it should be possible! Project mAIchart PO confidently started in 2023. However, reality turned out to be unruly. The first NOLAI project will stop. Not because the dashboard is impossible (we don’t give up that easily), but these first lessons ask for reconsideration.
A question deserving an answer
Co-creation manager Annelies Wiggers: “Developing a dashboard with a complete and clear overview of a group of students was too big of a challenge for a three-year project. Therefore, we chose for the mAIchart PO project to focus on the consolidating of data from math software for middle school. Math is a linear process (first math tables, then fractions, for example). Even with that limitation, we knew it would be hard. But we couldn’t pass up this challenge. Is someone should be able to create this dashboard, it should be the national education lab, so we just went for it!” Lucas Onderwijs elementary schools, Stichting Viertaal and Stichting Scala were paired with researchers from Utrecht University and the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen.
Sorting chaos into order
Merging different data streams into one central dashboard is a challenge on its own but creating a smart dashboard which uses AI to help teachers interpret the data easier is something else entirely. Annelies: “We’re talking about completely distinct kinds of data, from text to graphs and from detailed to overarching. You’re not just comparing apples to oranges; you’re trying to invent a whole new fruit. Developing the AI is not everything, the process also asks a lot of the teachers: they have to indicate what is important and what not. They have to be able to monitor the results of a smart dashboard.”
AI doesn’t necessarily make things easier for teachers
Just like in other NOLAI projects, developing a prototype makes you consider the purpose of it. What data is important, how do you interpret it and is every teacher able to? What do they need for it, and how do you find the time for this necessary professional development. It quite the challenge for teachers and schools. Using AI to quicken or simplify the process seems like a quick fix, but it is never that easy. Annelies: “A teacher who goes into the settings and changes them, might change the outcomes of the dashboard. You must know how to use it.”
AI could improve education
Annelies: “If we succeed in creating a smart dashboard, teachers will, above all, have a clearer overview and earlier insight into the status of their teaching. It gets easier to interpret what a student can and cannot do, and which steps a teacher should take. A central dashboard will show which student missed crucial explanation or understood it wrong. Teachers really can use that insight.” Researchers created use cases, teacher profiles, to map what information is useful for teachers and when.
Law of the inhibitory lead
The mAIchart PO project was the very first in a series of now 26 projects (with more on the way). Annelies: “NOLAI had just started, and we had to find our way still. Some things were easier than expected, but there were also setbacks. mAIchart PO started without an affiliated company. We thought we could involve developers when the first project phase had started. That process took more time than we expected. In hindsight, starting the concept phase without a company was a great loss.”
Starting over
This last year talks with developers are getting more concrete. Multiple Edtech companies are willing to develop, research and possibly implement a responsible prototype using educational AI. With that, the co-creation triangle is complete with education, science and business working together as equals. This new collaboration asks for a clean slate, to give the smart dashboard the biggest chance possible. Annelies: “The requests for a central dashboard have not lessened in the last year. Education really deservers a solution like this!”
Contact information
- Organizational unit
- National Education Lab AI (NOLAI)
- Theme
- Artificial intelligence (AI)