AI lesson-making assistant

The introduction of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 has given the development in the world of artificial intelligence a huge boost. Things that were previously only possible in our imagination have suddenly become very accessible to everyone. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, now also offers an API to easily incorporate AI into a product. That was the reason for the integration in the education platform LessonUp.

LessonUp & AI
LessonUp, one of our most successful ventures, has been thinking for some time about whether and how AI should be used on the platform. In the educational world, ChatGPT received particularly negative news, because of students using it to do their homework.

Opportunities for education
However, AI also offers true opportunities for education. After we gave a presentation about the opportunities of AI for LessonUp, the The Hague based scale-up realized that it was time to take action quickly. Generating content, something ChatGPT is good at, matches perfectly with generating quizzes and entire lessons within LessonUp. This not only saves time for the teacher, but also helps to transfer the lesson material even better with interaction in the classroom.

Prototype
To validate this idea technically, a prototype was developed. The management was so enthusiastic about this, that a team was immediately put together to work on the integration of AI in LessonUp. This enthusiasm was partly fueled by the fact that LessonUp's competition, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, was also working on AI integration.

Integrate AI into existing product
We helped the LessonUp team integrate AI into their platform. Implementation challenges included the interface, whether or not to use jargon, the quality of the generated content, and keeping costs down - because AI unfortunately isn't free. The choice was to start by generating an AI quiz & poll that was distributed among 100 beta testers, all teachers, to collect feedback. These teachers then tested the entire lesson generator. With all the feedback collected, the product has been improved for the rollout to all teachers.

Enthusiastic teachers
Two and a half months after the initial presentation of Q42 within LessonUp, the AI lesson-making assistant was rolled out to all teachers. Result: a lot of enthusiastic reactions from teachers. Within weeks, thousands of slides were generated with the AI lesson generator for use in education. In addition, this early implementation of AI in an existing product received a lot of media attention from BNR Nieuws and Het Financieele Dagblad, among others.

A new version, and her name is Maia
A few months after launch, we helped develop a new version of the AI lesson generator. In this V2, not only the user interface has been updated. We have made it possible to create lessons based on photos and large texts. Thanks to this new feature, teachers can, for example, take a photo of a museum sign, a brochure or an information board and then convert this footage into a lesson. Screenshots of an article and parts of a syllabus can also be uploaded to convert this source material into a digital lesson. With this new version, LessonUp has also given the lesson generator a name: Maia, after the mythical mother of the Greek god Hermes.

AI is in its early stages and will undoubtedly continue to improve. For LessonUp, this is just the beginning. The scale-up is therefore continuing according to its own credo: "Make every class better than the last".