Louise Holland-Salmon, CEO

During the autumn term of 2023, whilst I was presenting at a conference in London, I was introduced to the work of Interactive Tutor. There had been lots of AI tools bubbling up to the surface, however, having worked in Education for a number of years, nothing had landed as well with me as Interactive Tutor.

In a nutshell, Interactive Tutor is an AI solution, a bit like ChatGPT except it can be fully customised to the needs of teachers. Everything from how the AI is trained to the way it behaves and looks, and this got me thinking, about my current staff, the learners we train in education in digital skills, and all my previous colleagues;

Can AI improve the work-life balance of our teachers? And if so, ethically how?

I have personally been using ChatGPT for quite some time, along with the team at Primary Goalinnovatively creating test GPT’s, exploring for their learners. Personally, it has revolutionised the way I brainstorm ideas, write text and even analyse data. But there is a limitation regarding ethics and access, along with the continual sense checking as ChatGPT is built upon the entire internet, inheriting all its biases, contradictions, etc. For general purposes, this poses no issue, but for specific needs, such as crafting material for our training courses, ChatGPT falls short either because of those dreaded “hallucinations” or just because it lacks relevance to my topic of work.

During my initial conversations with Alex Fahie, Founder and CEO of Interactive Tutor, explaining how the Primary GoalDigital Champion programme leads on Digital training for staff in the Education sector, it was Interactive Tutors promise of total customisation intrigued me. What if we could have all the functionality of ChatGPT that also gives me, the user, control over how the AI behaves and what information it uses to answer my questions?

Through this conversation my intuition told me that Interactive Tutor appears to be coming at the perfect time – as we know, teacher workloads have skyrocketed in the past few years and with no likelihood of this reducing in the near future as our educators are grappling with burnout and stress, struggling to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Particularly those who do not have a strong foundation of Digital Skills, hence why the Digital Champion programmeis so impactful to staff in Education, could perhaps, Interactive Tutor be a fantastic piece in that jigsaw puzzle towards lifting work-loads of our educators?

Interactive Tutor, however, could be a total solution. If their AI can shoulder most of the workload, teachers would gain invaluable time back for themselves. Combined with the Digital Champion programme training, which will begin to incorporate training on Interactive Tutor, we have the right mix of an incredible winning formula. Digital skills to utilise the applications fully, Interactive Tutor to create those lesson plans, schemes or work and disseminate data.

In light of this, my passion to support my colleagues in the education sector propelled me to conduct several tests on areas I know are taking up teacher time:

Test 1: Scheme of Works

To make these tests fair I used both the paid versions of ChatGPT ($20 per month) and Interactive Tutor (£8.99 per month). I asked them to complete the same task and I would add the specific training data I wanted the AI to use.

Let’s start with ChatGPT, having originally studied a BEd in English and Drama,

I asked it to “create a scheme of work for Tudor England”. The result was pretty good, in a short amount of time I had a pretty good scheme of work that I could use to plan my lessons on Tudor England.

Then I tried Interactive Tutor. To train the AI you need to add a file for it to read, I used the Primary National Curriculum for History as well as a government website:

It took perhaps 5 minutes for the AI to be trained, and then I asked it the same question I asked ChatGPT, “create a scheme of work table for Tudor England”.

As you can see, whilst the format was the same, the level of detail and relevance to the curriculum was totally different.

Whilst both ChatGPT and Interactive Tutor were able to save me time, the output of Interactive Tutor, because I had controlled it, was far more valuable. I didn’t need to many any edits or tweaks, it was ready to go.

Test 2: Pupil Outcomes

My second test would look at using AI to support pupils outside of the classroom.

In order for anyone to use ChatGPT they need to create an account – this is problematic as ChatGPT does not allow access to students under the age of 13, and those under 18 still need parental consent:

The reason for this is safeguarding, giving AI access to children poses several risks as the ability to control what the child uses it for is limited.

Interactive Tutor also has a similar policy, however, they have a unique feature, that allows teachers to share AI they have built (with all of the appropriate safeguards) with pupils, it means that with a unique pin code a teacher can give a student access to that specific, safe to use AI bot without the pupil having to create an account.

So, I thought I would give it a try to see if it works.

I started in the same way as with the Scheme of WorkAI – but this time I wanted to create an AI that would let pupils interact with a real person from history, someone they could talk with to learn more about the subject I might be teaching.

Who better to use for my test then Samuel Pepys brought back to life with an AI based on his diaries.

This is another great feature of Interactive Tutor – you can train the AI on your information. This could be books, websites, text or spreadsheets. You can also tell the AI to only use your training data, use it to generate new responses or ignore it. This functionality is not only super safe, as the data is not readable by OpenAI or Interactive Tutor but also stops the hallucinations I experienced in ChatGPT.

To give this a good test I asked Samuel about the most famous event of his life, the Great Fire of London, so that seemed like a good place to start.

What is remarkable – if we ignore some of the American spellings – is that these are actually his words – taken from a copy of his daily diary (over 1 million words!) that I trained the AI on.

The people he references, they existed!

Beyond Pepys, teachers could create pupil facing AI to help with individual studying (tailored to that pupils learning requirements) or AI that gives feedback on essays before submission.

I think as a tool, that the teacher controls but can make accessible 24/7, this could be transformative.

Conclusion

Interactive Tutor is an exciting tool for teachers and schools. The fact that you can get all the benefits of ChatGPT but also the control to decide how the AI behaves and what it uses to answer questions is going to be transformative.

From administrative tasks to pupil outcomes. AI like ChatGPT and Interactive Tutor have the potential to dramatically alter work-life balance. To cut down on tasks and to support pupils outside of the classroom.

The main thing is that teachers don’t spend the time they have reclaimed tweaking and altering what the AI does for them. Once trained, within a matter of minutes, it behaves!

Combining that with the Digital Champion programme training with Primary Goal, Interactive Tutor and Primary Goal solutions are a match made in Digital Heaven for everyone in the Education sector.

Check out Interactive Tutor here: Interactive Tutor

Find out more about the fully funded Digital Champion Programme here: Primary Goal Digital Champion

If you’d like a Primary Goal partner code for Interactive Tutor, please click here