Leeds brand alignment agency Definition has trained an AI to teach UK key stage 3 and 4 maths and English using national curriculum approved methods. The agency claims this is is the first time an AI has been trained using data directly sourced from UK teachers.
The project, completed for online tuition company TLC LIVE, marks a significant milestone in the use of AI for education in the UK.
The 8B parameter Llama 3 model, released in April by Facebook-owned Meta, has been extensively tuned using 550,000 minutes of transcribed explanations from over 300 fully qualified UK teachers, who deliver tutoring for, TLC LIVE.
The resulting AI tutor, named ‘Manda’, is currently undergoing testing with students studying the UK national curriculum wherever they are in the world for £10 a month per student or £100 for an annual subscription.
Luke Budka, AI director at Definition, notes: “We spotted an opportunity to use TLC’s existing data to transform their business and open up an entirely new revenue stream for them. Our team used our private AI environment to remove all personal data from the transcriptions, extract the key stage 3 and 4 maths and English ‘explanations’ and turn them into training data.
“The model that was fine-tuned, ‘Manda’, sits within a tutoring platform we’ve built for TLC. It’s been constructed in a way that enables TLC to ‘continually’ train new versions of Manda, ensuring any changes in the national curriculum are reflected in the way Manda tutors her students.”
Simon Barnes, co-founder and CEO at TLC, added: “We’ve always been passionate about supporting children with tutoring delivered by actual teachers – we know, and research shows, this is the best option.
“An AI will obviously never be able to replicate what a real-life teacher can deliver, and our existing work with schools across the UK will continue as usual with the same fully qualified teachers.
“But we saw an opportunity to offer high quality but relatively low-cost AI tutoring, using national curriculum approved methodologies, and decided we should build Manda to at least give parents a new option, amongst all the other AI tutors that have quickly sprung up over the last 18 months.”
Josh Blackburn, COO at TLC LIVE (pictured) said: “Coincidentally we finished training Manda on the same day the government announced they were working on an AI to help teachers mark homework and produce lesson content. Education is a great use case for the tech, as there’s so much existing content available to train on.”
Manda generates text and code only, with a knowledge cut off date of March 2023. It is updated on an ongoing basis by TLC LIVE’s internal academic team, to improve its ability to explain questions to students. All student chats with the AI tutor are checked against a blacklist of prohibited terms and phrases and protected in an encrypted database.
