Mobile technology enables students to learn at anytime and from anywhere; however, for effective learning with mobile technology, the education system must match the student to the right tutor and content, and the system must keep track of the students. This presentation introduces a learning management system with expert-based collective advising mechanism (ECAM) that facilitate online one-on-one tutoring. ECAM system is supported by Beijing (China) government and aims for alleviating education inequality between rural area and central city. Over 19,000 rural students in grade 7 and grade 8 have benefited by ECAM system since 2016. Over 3,000 teachers in the central city are involved in helping the students. In a result, the teachers and the students generated over 210,000 tutoring sessions together. Artificial intelligence plays important roles at three components in the system: students’ competencies tracking, student-teacher matching, and tutoring session assistance.
Students’ competencies tracking: A Knowledge graph for each subject is used to record all pieces of knowledge that students need to learn. All the learning materials and exercises in ECAM system are attach to the corresponding part of the knowledge graph. When students learn with ECAM system, their competences on the corresponding parts of the knowledge graph are updated with their types of behaviors. Prediction model is built to facilitate this auto-tracking process, so that the ECAM system is able to predict a student’s competence on the piece of knowledge with limited number of behaviors from the student.
Student-teacher matching: Teachers’ teaching expertise are varied on the topics of a subject. Different students have different strengths and weaknesses as well. Both of students and teachers are profiled in the ECAM system. When a student makes a tutoring request, the system automatically recommends teachers to the student, in order to maximize the effectiveness of each online one-on-one tutoring session. The strength and the weakness of a student is also shown to the matched teacher, so that the teacher can save time in assessing the student.
Tutoring session assistance: The teachers use an advanced digital pen, which is integrated with ECAM system to do annotation to answer questions during one-on-one tutoring with students. It allows teachers to share their handwriting on paper with students on the screen of their mobile phone. Both of handwriting notes and tutoring audio are recorded for researchers to explore tutoring patterns. When efficient and inefficient tutoring patterns can be identified automatically, the ECAM system is able to provide feedback to both students and teachers at the end of each tutoring session.
Although ECAM system only had its evaluation running in Beijing until now, the system can be implemented anywhere in the world to allow students access to education regardless of location. This will provide equal opportunity for all to access education regardless of age and education will be inclusive since the system will adapt the educational experience for each student using artificial intelligence.
