A new AI lesson planner developed by the Oak National Academy and based on its “curriculum principles” will allow teachers to create personalised resources in minutes.
The “AI Lesson Assistant”, called Aila, is the online school’s “first step to unleashing teachers’ creativity”, said Oak’s engineering chief John Roberts. It can be used from today here.
Qualitative research conducted with around 60 teachers found their time saved on lesson planning was around three-and-a-half hours per week, the government quango said.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary at the ASCL school leaders’ union, said the tool would help “give teachers their Sunday nights back”.
While still in a “beta phase”, teachers will be able to follow a step-by-step process to make resources which “match the needs of their class, location or preferred approach”.
They include lesson plans, teacher slides, pupil quizzes and pupil worksheets with practice tasks.
Examples of its use include tailoring a geography lesson to a local landmark, amending reading difficulty according to pupil need and adding extra activities to resources.
Teachers have raised concerns about the accuracy, bias and safety of using AI in the classroom. But Oak said Aila was based on its “curriculum principles”.
It also mostly draws from Oak’s own approved resources, which have been checked by expert teachers for accuracy, and they have helped the tool understand the national curriculum. The tool was built to use Chat GPT4, a large-language model.
Oak has been given £2 million to fund its AI work, on top of the £43 million for its curriculum development.
The project is separate to a £3 million government AI “content store” announced last week. That scheme will help the technology be more reliable to help teachers mark work and also plan lessons.
‘Tested by thousands of teachers’
Roberts, director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy, said it was “our first step to unleashing teachers’ creativity through this technology, with an AI tool designed specifically for and by teachers”.
It has been tested by “thousands” of teachers in the last six months.
Oak will “continually evaluate” the tool to “check the quality and performance of the resources generated”.
The tool currently can’t provide images for resources, but instead suggests where to find them. Oak hopes to make this function possible in the future.
Oak is also developing an application programming interface (API) to allow companies to build off, adapt or integrate any of Oak’s content into their existing AI tools, or create new products.
The online school’s new resources are all published on an open licence.
