University of Washington releases free AI tool for quicker, better lesson plans

Teachers are spending more than 10 hours per week prepping their lesson plans, cutting into time that could be spent with students. A team at the University of Washington wants to help the educators recoup some of those hours and at the same time produce better lessons.

Over the past two years, the group has developed a product called Colleague that uses AI and chatbots to assist K-12 teachers. It’s now available to them for free.

“We’ve really designed this with and for teachers,” said Min Sun, director of Artificial Intelligence for Education in the UW’s College of Education and leader of the Colleague project.

Research team led by Professor Min Sun wins $1.5 million NSF grant to leverage machine learning to assess mathematics lesson plan quality in the middle grades

An innovative new project that leverages machine learning to assess mathematics lesson plan quality in the middle grades has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to receive a $1.5 million grant. Through this project, a cross-university research team led by principal investigator Dr. Min Sun of the University of Washington College of Education will identify ways to measure the quality of large quantities of open-source mathematics lesson plans using an integration of cutting-edge machine learning techniques, knowledge of effective mathematics education and human feedback.