AI for Educators

1. User Research

We have conducted literature review, interviews and survey with elementary school teachers to obtain qualitative and quantitative data on their opinions and attitudes towards AI in education.

Desktop Research

We have identified several common applications of AI in the classroom, which include:

• Generating class materials / lesson plan

• Providing personalized tutoring

• Gamification / Immersive learning

• Improving students’ writing & grammar

• Automated essay grading

Survey

Learnings from our survey are as follows:

• About 75% of those surveyed say their limited time hinders their exploration of AI.

• Many of those surveyed say that the frustration experienced when utilizing AI stems from the lack of knowledge, guidance, and support.

• The primary tasks for which those surveyed seek AI assistance include lesson planning, specifically differentiation, and using AI as an interactive teaching tool in class.

Interviews

Learnings from our interviews:

• Most stressed that AI would be best as a supplementary tool, helping save time.

• Most were interested in learning more and mentioned AI is inevitable.

• Interviewees talked about their major concerns being loss of critical thinking skills, accuracy/misconceptions, and safety.

  
  

Insights

• Limited Time

  • Elementary school teachers often struggle with limited time, which serves as a significant obstacle to their exploration of new tools. This emphasizes the need for ease of adoption for new AI tools.

• Frustration Linked to AI Knowledge Gap

  • Many elementary school teacher attribute their frustration to a lack of adequate knowledge about AI. This shows that readily-available education around AI for Education is needed.

• Common Uses of AI in Education - Supplementary

  • The primary applications envisioned by elementary school teachers for AI in education are lesson planning, specifically differentiation, and using AI as an interactive teaching tool in class. This suggests that these types of tools or education on how to do these tasks would be most utilized.

• Current Low Adoption due to Concerns

  • Relatively few teachers have experimented with AI due to concerns related to misuse, privacy, security, and disinformation. This emphasizes the need to combat these concerns with safeguards or education.

2. Empathy Map

We have consolidated the survey and interview results and created an empathy map to better visualize users’ needs and desires.

3. Persona

We have created a few personas based on our research results to better understand and empathize with our target audience.

4. How Might Me?

We have come up with 4 “How Might We?” questions and corresponding recommendations to guide our next steps.

5. Sketching

Our team has done a design studio and come up with different sketches of our potential prototypes.

6. Storyboard

We have designed different storyboards to visually map out the user's experience with our prototype.

7. Usability Test

We have come up with a low-fi prototype, a website that provides educators with a personalized and self-paced learning experience around AI.

We then conducted usability tests on a few target users and noticed a few common problems of our initial prototype:

• Fail to locate the lesson plans

• Fail to identify differences between the icons on the Learning Path

• Fail to locate the correct button to start the lesson

8. Heuristic Evaluation

We have conducted a heuristic evaluation and noticed the following results:

• Visibility of system status

  • There are progress bars showing learners’ learning progress.

  • → Severity level: 2

• User control and freedom

  • There is no button for users to go backward.

  • → Severity level: 4

• Consistency and standards

  • The design is consistent & minimalist.

  • → Severity level: 1

• Aesthetic and minimalist design

  • More pictures and graphic design with consistent colours need to be added.

  • → Severity level: 3