About Jisc’s Artificial Intelligence Program of Pilots
Jisc’s Artificial Intelligence team provides resources and guidance to facilitate the ethical and effective adoption of AI across the sector. A key area of the team’s work is running pilots of promising AI tools and products with Jisc members. These pilots provide members with the opportunity to gain direct experience with AI-assisted tools and the results provide valuable insights which are shared with the sector.
What is TeacherMatic?
TeacherMatic is a generative AI-powered platform tailored for educators. It provides an extensive toolkit featuring more than 50 innovative tools designed to simplify the creation of educational content. These tools help in generating various teaching aids, such as lesson plans, quizzes, schemes of work and multiple-choice questions, without users needing to have expertise in prompt engineering. Instead, educators can issue straightforward instructions to produce or adapt existing resources, including presentations, Word documents, and PDFs. The main goal of TeacherMatic is to enhance teaching efficiency and lighten educators’ workloads. To allow teachers to dedicate more time to student interaction and less to repetitive tasks.
Piloting TeacherMatic
In April 2023, TeacherMatic was launched with the aim of reducing teachers’ workload and enhancing productivity using generative artificial intelligence. The Artificial Intelligence team at Jisc collaborated with TeacherMatic to run a pilot program. This initiative was designed to evaluate how the AI tool could save educators time by streamlining the creation of resources and teaching materials.
The Further Education TeacherMatic Pilot – an overview
Through the pilot, we wanted to understand:
- Can TeacherMatic save time?
- How easy is TeacherMatic to use and does it enable more people to utilise generative AI?
- Whether TeacherMatic can generate suitable content?
The pilot process
The pilot was divided into two distinct phases: the first phase spanned from May 2023 to June 2023, while the second phase extended from June 2023 to February 2024. Each participating institution received 50 licenses for 12 months, enabling around 400 participants to actively engage with and evaluate the TeacherMatic platform.
Participants attended a training session designed to ensure they were able to use the tool. This session was a joint effort, collaboratively conducted by the TeacherMatic team and the Jisc team. The goal was to equip all participants with a thorough understanding of the platform’s functionalities and features, enabling them to use TeacherMatic effectively.
Piloting intuitions
The pilot aimed to trial TeacherMatic across different subject areas at different levels and evaluate the quality and level of content generated by TeacherMatic. The successful pilot applicants were Basingstoke College of Technology, Milton Keynes College, New City College, Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group, Northampton College, NPTC Group of Colleges, Southern Regional College and West College Scotland. These were selected from over 60 applicants.
Key findings from the pilot
TeacherMatic’s strengths
- TeacherMatic can save staff time, on average users said they saved two hours ten minutes per week.
- The platform is easy to use and user-friendly, particularly for AI beginners.
- It produces good-quality content.
- TeacherMatic effectively helps to enhance AI literacy among staff, notably increasing their understanding of generative AI capabilities.
- Participants feel TeacherMatic has had a positive impact on learner experience as it helps by adding variety.
- It produces good-quality content.
- The most used generators were lesson plans, multiple-choice questions, scheme of work, PowerPoint, and classroom questions.
TeacherMatic’s suggested areas for development
- Some participants found that some generated learning activities can sometimes be repetitive.
- Concerns about the content not being challenging enough for some advanced topics.
- The quality of the presentation generator is not as good as other AI tools. Some participants mentioned accessibility needs when generating presentations the presentation did not generate suitable text formats for screen readers automatically.
- A dashboard feature showing individual user activity for better tracking and support would be useful.
TeacherMatic, the team
- The TeacherMatic team is proactive in implementing user feedback to improve the platform.
- A wealth of experience and understanding of the further education sector.
- TeacherMatic has built a community which looks at how to get the most from the AI tool and to share experiences.
Wider perspectives of the pilot
Colleges expressed the following benefits of participating in the pilot:
- How generative AI can help with staff workload and wellbeing.
- TeacherMatic is particularly helpful for new teaching staff.
- The potential to improve learner experiences with added variety in teaching, learning and assessment.
Feedback about the pilot
- Workload Reduction: TeacherMatic can help with creating teaching resources.
- Training: Initial training is good as many demonstrations are provided.
- User Onboarding and Engagement: Straightforward account creation, with a recommendation for better tracking of active users.
- Institutional Feedback: Overall positive impact highlighted, especially for new educators and those facing curriculum changes.
- Collaborative Strategy: To get the most from TeacherMatic users should collaborate on generation ideas and methods.
- Pricing: Most participants felt that the pricing was in line with their expectations.
TeacherMatic’s roadmap
Since evaluating the pilot, more generators have been added with now over 70 generators. These include additions such as “Ask Someone Famous”, “Survey Creator”, “Start of Lesson Recap”, and “Likert Survey Creator”, among many others designed to support marketing and administrative tasks.
There has been an addition to Multiple-choice Generator which now allows users to integrate YouTube videos directly. By copying and pasting a video link, the tool can now generate multiple-choice questions and answers based on the video content.
Additionally, Microsoft Single Sign-On (SSO) has been implemented to streamline the login process. Looking ahead there will be the introduction of a mobile app and meta generators which will combine the outputs of several generators from a single prompt.
Summary
The pilot indicates that TeacherMatic can save users time and create good quality resources. Participants commended the platform for its ease of use, efficient content generation, and benefits to workload. Feedback also highlighted areas for improvement and new feature suggestions which the TeacherMatic team were very quick to take on board and where possible implement.
Participants found TeacherMatic to be user-friendly, particularly praising its easy-to-use interface and simple content generation process. The platform was noted for its instructional icons, videos, and features such as Bloom’s taxonomy, which assists in creating educational content efficiently. However, suggestions for enhancements include the ability to integrate multiple generators into a single generator. It also remains essential for users to evaluate the generated content, ensuring it is suitable and accessible to the intended audience.
TeacherMatic was well-received across institutions, for its capabilities, especially beneficial for new teaching staff and those adapting to changing course specifications. Feedback showed that TeacherMatic is particularly valuable for those previously unfamiliar with generative AI. Pricing was generally seen as reasonable, aligning with most participants’ expectations.
TeacherMatic has been well-received, with a majority of participants recognising its benefits and expressing a willingness to continue using and recommending the tool.
Jisc’s Artificial Intelligence team recommendations
As the pilot showed, staff were able to save time compared to traditional methods. TeacherMatic is a good product and well suited to Further Education and is supported by an experienced team within this sector. The pilot also showed that TeacherMatic is a suitable tool for building AI literacy among staff and exposing them to its capabilities in a controlled environment.
Find out more by visiting our Artificial Intelligence page to view publications and resources, join us for events and discover what AI has to offer through our range of interactive online demos.
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Get in touch with the team directly at AI@jisc.ac.uk