Artificial Intelligence | Lesson 6.3

CENTURY Tech

The Problem

There are two key problems in education around the globe. First, many students do not meet the required learning standards. Second, educators spend the majority of their time on administrative tasks such as grading and data tracking—time not spent personalizing learning and improving the quality of instruction.

The Solution

CENTURY’s AI-based platform personalizes learning to overcome the traditional one-size-fits-all education models. As students learn on CENTURY, every click, score, and interaction is recorded. Artificially intelligent algorithms identify knowledge gaps, understand how students learn, and customize each student’s most effective learning pathway.

Furthermore, CENTURY automates administrative tasks, such as routine assessments, monitoring progress, and generating progress reports—giving educators more time for planning and teaching. Easy-to-use dashboards provide instant access to detailed learning data at an individual and class level to assess student performance. With these resources, CENTURY is helping pave the way to a world in which every child achieves their full potential.

CENTURY is building a future of education where educators are appropriately supported to provide effective education and learners have access to a 24/7 curriculum created for their specific and precise learning needs at every moment.

CENTURY provides genuine adaptivity and personalization to overcome the traditional one-size-fits-all education model that leaves many students disengaged. Students learn the platform while their interaction with the platform is recorded. This data feeds into artificially intelligent algorithms that learn how each individual student learns and plot the most effective route through learning material for each individual. Gaps in foundational knowledge are quickly identified and remedied, weaknesses are scaffolded and strengths built upon with automated, constructive feedback provided at the point of need. Differentiated material is provided, based on students’ focus, understanding level and their pace of learning, among other factors, to ensure that every learning experience is maximally effective.

By automating routine administrative tasks, such as marking, monitoring progress and generating progress reports, CENTURY relieves the administrative burden on educators. The most effective feedback provides cues and reinforcement for learners. It takes place at the point of learning, so CENTURY’s auto-marked assessments remove the pressure of marking from the teacher and improve the quality of learning for students. With CENTURY’s real-time analysis of student performance, educators have thorough and accurate insight into their students’ learning. Easy-to-use dashboards provide instant access to detailed learning data at an individual and class level, without the usual manual data input that teachers are all too familiar with.

CENTURY can save educators up to six hours per week, allowing more time to be spent planning flexible and effective interventions. Using CENTURY, educators can quickly identify which students need further assistance and which need more challenging work, understand the trends and patterns at a class level and update their lesson plans to ensure all students are making the required progress.

The combination of providing personalized resources to every student and enabling educators to focus their energy where it is most effective can reduce achievement gaps, particularly for learners who are typically let down by the education system. Students who are from disadvantaged backgrounds and those who have specific learning needs. It is a travesty that any child is left behind. The blow is hardened when so many of these children are those who are already so vulnerable. Analysis already shows that when using CENTURY, all students, regardless of their background, prior attainment or specific needs, achieve similar levels of understanding. CENTURY is helping to pave the way to a world where every child achieves their full potential.

Please watch the following video to see how their app is used to help students and teachers for a better education experience.

How Century Works by Century Tech News

Differentiating Factor

CENTURY is the first educational platform to combine artificial intelligence, pedagogical insights, and cognitive neuroscience research. Rather than simply digitizing the existing practices, CENTURY has created a platform to reinvent how education should be implemented by creating new content tailored to its platform. CENTURY has crafted different solutions for different problems. For example, long-form answers cannot be auto-marked, so they ensured that CENTURY would still reduce teacher workload by allowing teachers to record their feedback and instantly send it to students. CENTURY incorporates up-to-date research into its platform and is constantly evolving in order to improve education for all.

Market Opportunity

• The global Learning Management System (LMS) market is expected to grow to the US $18 billion by 2025.
• Solely in the UK, over 1 million students were in underperforming schools in 2016.
• A 2018 UK poll found that 80 percent of teachers were considering leaving the profession due to excessive workload. By using CENTURY, teachers save up to six hours per week—giving them more time to focus on their students.

Partnerships

Partnerships help CENTURY develop its technology and strategy. Currently, CENTURY works with:

• University College London for machine learning development and pedagogy advice
• University of Leeds for diagnostic and cognitive research
• Capita, the largest software supplier to UK schools
• Whole Education, a network of more than 300 UK schools driving innovation in education

Analysis

Scouting AI Opportunity

As for market analysis, CENTURY has noticed that its competitors are still using the traditional way of teaching, which has resulted in many students being frustrated and educators feeling hopeless and inundated with the workload. Also, their service was a “one size fits all” type of solution. Their biggest strength was that Priya Lakhani, the founder of CENTURY, had an astonishing entrepreneurial track record and was able to convince individuals from different areas to join her company and believe she would succeed in reaching her goal. We can see personalized services in all business models in the tech industry. Amazon recommends new products based on your previous buys and activities on the internet. Google has personalized ads based on your search history. But this approach is new in the education industry. Based on its strengths and competitors’ weaknesses, they partnered with teams from different areas, such as education experts and experts from different types of AI, to develop a tool that would individualize the education journey and decrease the educator’s workload. As discussed in the previous section, one of the most important advantages of AI is that it can individualize users’ experiences instead of providing the same experience to everyone. Individualization of education is a significant differentiating factor.

Assumptions: For their product to work, they needed the students to dial in and use it frequently. Besides, teachers must be convinced that the product is going to reduce the workload to put the time needed to learn how to use the product. Also, they needed the schools to trust the product analysis. To do so, they performed many case studies to prove that their product can change education for the better and improve the student’s quality of education. As the schools and teachers dialed into the product, they were able to integrate their product into students’ daily educational experience.

As for technical assumptions, they needed to assume they were able to develop an accurate model that could evaluate students’ performance. Again, by looking at research papers (Zhang & Aslan, 2021), existing studies showed that, in theory, models could predict students’ performance efficiently. The only challenge is how to use these models to make sure that the performance is optimal.

The process they envisioned was that the model receives students’ information and outputs different types of analysis, their approximate understanding, the suggested assignments and the type of support they need. Figure 6.4 shows the breakdown of this process into AI pieces that they needed to develop.

Figure 6.4 | The breakdown of the CENTURY TECH process. The navy boxes indicate AI-powered bits, grey represents traditional bits and light blue indicates the combination of both AI and traditional methods.

We are now ready to develop the Framing Canvas. Figure 6.5 shows the Framing Canvas for CENTURY TECH.

Figure 6.5 | Framing Canvas for CENTURY TECH.

The following is an interview with Parya Lakhani, the CEO of CENTURY Tech. We highly recommend you to watch her explain the business side of their company.

Teachers TV: Starting Out in Business – Priya Lakhani by EDCHAT