Quizlet Leads the Education Revolution with Generative AI: Individualized Learning Materials and Methods.
3/5/2023 • 2 min read
My father grew up with books. I grew up with Google search and Youtube. There was very little my father could learn from that wasn't in a book. And because books are physical, there's a limit as to how many you can access at one moment. Even if you find yourself in the grandest of libraries, you'll only be exposed to a faction of human intelligence.
Lets breakdown school into two major inputs:
Traditional schools, including the ones that my father experienced, took a fixed set of materials, and taught them to a large group of students using a fixed set of teaching methods. You had almost zero influence on the things you learned, let alone how you learned them.
The only way you could be exposed to new information was to wander off to another school or classroom with the hopes that different material was being taught.
And the only way you could be exposed to new teaching methods was to find a new teacher. My father lived in a very small village in Yemen, and so an abundance of educators was not something he could take advantage of. And the only way my father
Fast forward to today, with the invention of the internet and platforms like Khan Academy, students are now armed with the ability to choose their learning materials. This was a huge paradigm shift for students who were intellectually curious beyond what was provided to them by their schools. You could search from a growing library of materials and learn any of them, all for free, from anywhere. This shift individualized the materials that students would learn from by delivering choice in the materials.
However, the methods which students learned is still fixed - Khan Academy provides a fixed set of learning materials, which are produced by their educators and content creators. If you're a student who learns best from methods A, B, and C, but Khan Academy only provides methods C, and D, well you're better off scouring Youtube until you find an educator who's teaching using methods C and D.
With the advent of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM's), I believe a revolution in education is beginning – one where both the materials and the methods will become individualized and scalable for all humans, across all disciplines.
And the first form of this idea has come to life through Quizlets Q-Chat study coach.
This article is the first part of a series of articles I hope to write about my vision for the future of education.
Growing up, I felt like education was on a death spiral...until now. I went from thinking that we would never be able to deliver high quality education at scale, and that students' relationships with school would always be negative and adversarial...until now.
I am so excited for this future, and could not contain my excitement enough to even proof read this post. I hope this article finds someone who is excited about this future as I am, and that that someone reaches out to me so that we can talk a bit more about where we think this is going, and how we can help accelerate this future.
Regards - Abe.