alt Hacker NewsI'm on record saying that a system like this with some extra hardware (i.e. a way for the LLM to have live understanding of the student's paper notebook or handout which are being written in with a plain old pencil) combines the best of both worlds - individual tutoring with approximately zero screen time which scales linearly with the number of students. The role of the teacher or professor then becomes a manager of the student - agentic tutor pairs, a referee when the student and model disagree, etc. and most importantly still being the human teacher you can just talk to in the human education process.
I'm convinced this is the future of education - models are there, we need the classroom tech to catch up. The alternative is obvious and quantified in the paper - students just use models to do their work for them and learn nothing.
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A 'smart pen' that records the student's writing in some way, maybe? My first thought was a tablet that boots straight into a writing software but students should not be subjected to any amount of latency in their writing.
Practically, I think if you want the AI system to have a live view of what the student's doing you're going to have to replace one of either the tablet or the writing instrument. A wearable camera could work as well but there are issues with that.
Today I saw a demo of Remarkable turned into Voldemort's diary from Harry Potter - you write to it, and it writes back, in handwriting.
I would add that somewhere in there should be a spaced repetition algorithm.
Spaced repetition is very effective, but it's really really clunky to use. My unpopular opinion is that we all have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to creating "cards", and people talk about how valuable creating cards is; but I think it stucks, it takes a lot of time.
If AI is already teaching me math (let's say), it would be nice to tell the AI/app "quiz me on this periodically", and then the AI makes up a fresh polynomial to factor (or whatever) and presents that to you according to a spaced repetition algorithm.
Behind the scenes, the AI should have access to what has happened the last several times a specific topic has been quized, so the AI can watch to see that certain mistakes are resolved, and the AI might also know better how to correct the user if it has context about previous quizzes of that topic.
I work in consulting and one of my projects is piloting an AI use case for a department within one of my clients. On a discovery call someone casually brought up that they bought a reMarkable notebook themselves and were wondering if it could be integrated into the use case. It really got me thinking.
Maybe reMarkable or something like it could help bridge a student's writing with an LLM without having to fall back to a laptop or ipad.
https://remarkable.com/