A combination of short-form video lessons created by human experts and videos created by generative AI is the model that Numerade hopes will change online education for students across the country and the world.
That’s what Numerade Co-Founder and CEO Nhon Ma told us when he spoke with Telecompetitor last week.
The Numerade model is fairly simple. The company partners with “more than 60,000 human educators who created millions of video tutorials.” These videos are short and easily digestible — Ma compared the approach to TikTok, describing shorter videos as “aligned with how students learn.”
The educational content of the videos is supplemented with videos created via generative AI (GenAI). Ma explained how the process works.
“If a student needs help… they can come to our site and ask questions. We provide a video tutorial created by an educator — or created by GenAI based on the educator’s previous videos, to make sure they are pedagogically aligned.”
Ma said that by tracking how students interact with the educational videos — at what point videos are paused, or which segments are re-watched — generative AI can understand “where that student is on their learning journey.” Numerade can then recommend additional content, sometimes created by generative AI, to help make sure students understand the content.
“We’re trying to make the AI videos more like the human educator videos. [The AI videos] have someone walking through the tutorial — the actual step-by-step solution — with a voiceover going through the problem and getting to the concept and the answer.”
Eventually, Ma hopes that Numerade’s human educator partners may have their own likenesses, including their unique teaching styles, used in generative AI content.
Generative AI for Rural Online Education
While Ma did not have specific data on the number of rural students using Numerade, he said that “35 to 40% of our user base in America is in non-metropolitan areas.” He stressed that anywhere a student can access the internet, they can use Numerade.
Ma said that about 50% of Numerade’s users are in K-12 grades — mostly middle and high school — and 50% are college students. Numerade strongly focus on STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), finding that students often start having challenges with these subjects in middle school. “A lot of students leave that track during middle school because they lack the support.”
Ma said that, with the rise of new generative AI technologies in the past few years, Numerade’s ability to leverage their human-made videos for educational generative AI content has grown. The company now has what they call the “NumerAI LLM” (large language model), which they have created using “open and closed LLMs, and large and small LLMs.”
The accuracy of AI-created content is an ongoing concern for Numerade. Ma said they ensure accuracy by using only best-of-breed LLMs. They also rely on their network of human educators to make sure both the accuracy of the generative AI content and the educational pedagogy are still at the highest levels of quality.
“It’s a continuous process,” Ma said.
