Classmate AI is a Moodle plugin that helps teachers and students with university course materials. It's a concept designed in a team of four during the 10-hour Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack) held at the University of Trento's Fablab. Classmate AI won the local competition, receiving the social impact award.

The challenge

The Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack) is a grassroots movement that aims to foster innovation, collaboration and creativity to drive positive change in digital education. It is an initiative of the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 of the European Commission and it holds events and competitions all over Europe.

For 2023, the theme was "AI in Education" and our team of four, composed of an educator and three computer scientists with expertise ranging from machine learning to front-end development, participated in the 10-hour hackathon held by the University of Trento's Fablab.

The challenge? Integrate AI in education with an eye on inclusivity, sustainability, and ethics.

Our solution

ClassMate AI is a Moodle plugin that works as a chatbot within Moodle university course pages, helping teachers and students by providing class transcriptions, translations, summaries and answering questions about class material.

By leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM), it makes personalized tutoring accessible to everyone, enhancing accessibility and usability of course materials.

It helps students by providing:

• Lecture transcriptions

• Clarifications about the material

• Material translation 

• Personalized exam preparation questions

• Suggestions for further material to read

• Mental map creation

It helps teachers by providing:

• Anonymized reports on students’ questions to Classmate AI, to uncover needs for clarification

• Feedback on course materials and areas for improvements

To ensure sustainability and scalability for the educational institutions, and privacy for all users, Classmate AI can be hosted locally by the institution or on the cloud if infrastructure is lacking.

By keeping it under institutional control, privacy for documents and materials is ensured, and it becomes possible to go for an eco-friendly approach with green energy for sustainability.

• Hosting Options: Local or cloud hosting of the AI models based on infrastructure availability

• Privacy Assurance: The institution's control ensures material privacy, involving no third-party companies

• Sustainability: Eco-friendly if the institute uses green energy

• Flexibility: Scalable and transferable solution

• Future Outlook: locally hosted solutions will become more cost-effective and simpler to set up

This solution can effectively address accessibility issues while prioritizing privacy and cost considerations.

With a scalable and straightforward implementation, our objective is not to overhaul the existing learning infrastructure but rather to enrich it by offering a personalized 24/7 online tutor that is accessible and user-friendly.

Moodle is a free open-source platform, making any educational institution able to leverage the benefits of ClassMate AI.

The full solution in detail is available on the DigiEduHack website.

Classmate AI won Trento's 2023 DigiEduHack competition, earning the social impact award.

The process

1. Relevance to Personal Experience

We started by identifying past experiences of ours in which we would have loved to have AI to help. All of us noted how having different learning styles means that teaching materials will always fall short for some student or another - all of us had experienced this.

Besides learning styles that clash with course material, there are more possible obstacles, such as:

• Language barriers 

• Learning impairments

• Difficult subjects 

How could we address these problems?

Our morning was characterized by a rich divergent phase in which we brainstormed and explored many different ideas:

• AI research tools

• students' needs

• teachers' needs

• accessibility specific solutions

• new learning platforms

• … and more, as shown by the never-ending list of post-it notes

As we approached lunch, we decided to take stock on the ideas that emerged and start to converge on a single solution.

In an ideal world, every student would have access to a tutor that:

• Is always there 

• Knows everything about every course materials 

• Can answer all of the questions

With the help of the DigiEduHack mentors, we realized that the best approach to help students and teachers based on the needs we identified was to leverage existing platforms to offer new functionalities, instead of conceiving new standalone solutions, therefore making development easier and lowering the barrier of adoption.

2. AI Integration

To address these considerations, we designed our solution as a Moodle plug-in. Since Moodle is a free, open-source learning environment adopted in 238 countries and with almost 400 million users, Classmate AI would be a plug-in that acts as a LLM chatbot inside the Moodle course page.

By having access to course materials and class recordings, Classmate AI could offer:

• Personalized learning

• Feedback

• Content generation

3. Inclusivity

AI should be used as a tool to bridge gaps, not create them. Classmate AI is meant to be a tool that caters to diverse learners, with different learning styles, backgrounds, and abilities, by modifying and adapting course material for different needs.

4. Sustainability

For the technical implementation, we thought long term.

To ensure both technological and pedagogical scalability, we thought of ClassMate AI as a third-party app integrated into Moodle through plugins, enabling communication between various databases, models, and files, connecting via API services and utilizing local computing resources.

These choices would allow the use of the latest models while maintaining privacy and cost effectiveness, expecting local solutions that will always be easier to host in the future.

Flexible for transfer and scaling, Classmate AI will adapt as both curricula and technological solutions evolve.

Takeaways

• Starting from personal experience makes any solution and its narrative much more powerful and captivating.
  
  

• Integrate expert knowledge into the core idea, staying true to it. We made use of the exchanges with the mentors constructively adding to our solution, changing it to make it better and more practical, without deviating from the needs and problems we identified.
  
  

• Organization of teamwork is fundamental. The coordination of divergent and convergent thinking phases was crucial for our ideation process and the delivery of a complete proposal.