How the AI Assistant in GoReact is Increasing Learner Engagement

PRESENTER

Adam Jordan

Adam is an experienced Analytics Manager with a proven track record in the computer software industry. He is skilled in Product Management, Databases, Operations, and Management. Adam has spearheaded the AI Assistant in GoReact, working closely with customers to guarantee we are building exactly what they need.

TRANSCRIPT

Music:

So thank you for the love. You brought my way. You gave me you all and all and now I feel 10 feet tall. So I love, thank you for the truth. You’ve let see. Thank you for the facts from my life was torn like windblown sin then rock was on when I love you. Thank you for

Erin Stanley:

That. Love to see the chat already so active. Welcome everyone to day two of Reaction. I hope everyone is a feeling, especially sunny today. My name is Aaron, I’m on the marketing team and we’re starting off today with our very own Adam Jordan, a product manager here at GoReact. He’s going to talk to us about the AI assistant and how it’s increasing learner engagement. He really is an expert in all things AI assistant. He has a wealth of knowledge, however, today’s session’s only 30 minutes, so if there are some things that he doesn’t cover that you would like to know more about, drop your questions in the q and a box and we’ll get to as many of those as possible. A fun fact about Adam, he did practice his presentation in GoReact and use the AI assistant to give him feedback. So it’s going to be incredible. Adam, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Adam Jordan:

Alright, yeah, thank you Aaron. I appreciate it. I appreciate everybody coming out today. Yeah, I’m excited to share a little bit about how the AI assistant is increasing learner engagement. I’ve been with GoReact for about four years now. I’ve been able to work on a variety of different features inside of the platform and I’ve really most recently been working on the AI assistant. It’s been really exciting to be able to work through all of that and build a lot of these features. So yeah, I’m excited to just kind of jump in and talk about this, but the first thing I want to establish is what is the AI assistant? So this is part of our advanced package that we launched back in July of 2024, and the AI assistant is more specifically covering three key features that are transcription, analytics, AI markers, and comments.

So the transcription is a breakdown of the words being spoken timestamped to the video that was created. The analytics are a series of different metrics inside of the application as well. Again, based on that transcript to be able to provide different insights into different speech patterns inside of the video. And these range from filler words to pauses to pacing and everything in between. And then finally, the AI markers and comments are a bit more of what we would consider the more modern approach of ai, which is LLM generated text and feedback and that sort of thing. And so those AI markers and comments are categories of feedback that are being applied to a student’s video that are guided by the instructor to provide the most helpful feedback that we can possibly create inside of there.

So when we started going down this road of adding the AI assistant, there were some specific goals that we wanted to make sure that we were able to accomplish with it. We wanted to work towards three very specific things of accelerating skill mastery by deeper engagement. We really wanted to have students and instructors have a better dialogue and be able to accelerate a lot of those interactions in a really meaningful way. The next was empowering learner led skill development. And this is often taking the path of encouraging your students to take more initiative in their own learning journey by providing additional insights and information for them to be able to improve on and then finally delivering more impactful feedback in less time. And this is really getting down to the heart of we want to maximize the value of instructor time inside of GoReact. And we were hoping that these tools will really help build that foundation for that to be able to happen.

While we were working on this and having different interactions with our customers and having different dialogues and seeing how it was being used, we came across what I’m going to call a fourth goal, that we are not just automating feedback, we’re crafting more time for the irreplaceable human moment. This was something that I think has always been important to GoReact, that we are facilitating a human moment, but seeing how it’s come together with the AI assistant to help facilitate more of these really meaningful moments has been absolutely incredible. It’s been very exciting to be a part of it and incredibly encouraging to see how our customers have been able to use this technology in such a meaningful way.

So we launched it back in July and now we have an opportunity today to take a look back and see what’s happening. What is the data showing us, what are we seeing inside of here that we can share with you to help us understand a little bit more about the impact it’s having on learner engagement and what that looks like. I do want to add a caveat that these are very early numbers. We’re still doing more analysis to follow up on this, but I wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into what that’s looking like.

Alright, so one of the baseline questions I wanted to ask was just how many AI markers were being applied to students’ videos in an average sense? And so the number of comments inside of here is 23. So we really were excited to be able to see that there was so much feedback, there was so many different categories. Being able to be applied to the students’ videos and seeing so many different insights being applied has been a really exciting thing for us. We had an immediate follow-up question though because as I mentioned, we really wanted those human moments to be this at the center of who and what GoReact is. And the first question we had is do AI markers result in fewer videos? Getting human comments. It was really critical to us that we were able to answer this question in a meaningful way. We wanted to be able to facilitate those really important moments. And luckily proving out in the data it showed that we did have an increase actually in the number of human comments when AI markers are getting applied. This was really important to us that we were able to really solidify this and have it come home that the AI assistant is part of the solution, it’s a tool for you, but not replacing anything there because we still need those human interactions to be happening.

Dr. Kendra Ray had a good quote about that layered approach of the human and the technology. She said that our students loved receiving the AI feedback. It captured so many valuable insights and we were able to expand on the feedback it provided. And so it was fantastic to see how those different interactions were happening. But being product people, we were very curious and we had more questions. We saw that more videos were getting comments in an overall sense, but was each video getting quite as many human moments? So were there fewer human comments being written on the videos themselves? And thankfully that turned out not to be the case. The number of human comments per video when AI markers were present was going up over 30%. And so we were incredibly encouraged again to see that we’re getting better engagement from the people involved with it by using that AI technology as a tool to facilitate a lot of those interactions.

Alright, and then another quote from Dr. Lori Dasa, the AI assistant supports varied insightful feedback that compliments the supervisor’s guidance. Again, it’s using these as tools to be able to facilitate those human interactions and that they’re supporting one another as we’re continuing to have those conversations is just so incredibly important for us and very, very exciting. Another question that we wanted to ask is, are human comments delayed because of the AI markers? Are people feeling less pressure to leave the feedback quickly? Since the AI comment is already happening and it happens within a minute or two, is there really that same urgency to provide that feedback? And thankfully, again, we found that no, yeah, human feedback was coming in sooner. We were seeing that it was coming in 14% sooner and that was fantastic to see that humans were leading more feedback, getting more engaged and it was coming in quicker and that was really exciting for us as well.

Another customer quote that I wanted to share was that this tool has been transformative, allowing us to see AI’s feedback on teaching goals and explore its ability to save time and focus on specific competencies. That was from Dr. Rochelle Warm. Again, I think we’re seeing very similar concepts that the AI assistant is serving as a tool to facilitate more conversations, more specific guidance from instructors. And it’s been very exciting for us to be building tools to facilitate some of those interactions. So moving on to self-reflection, this is a very critical part of GoReact, a very critical part of learning our AI markers, causing students to write less during self-reflection. And thankfully the answer is no. We’re seeing a fairly similar number of comments. We’re seeing a slight increase with the AI markers that people are wanting to write more inside of their videos during that self-reflection time. And so we were seeing a 14% increase and it was fantastic to be able to see that that was a net improvement on that self-reflection process.

Alright, and then another customer quote that I wanted to share was that the AI assistant allows the supervisors to spend their time deeply supporting the candidate and because of the AI functions, frees them up from the pretty standard feedback. We’ve seen that repeatedly that there’s some of this really standard feedback that you’re having from student to student to student. You’re giving a lot of that same feedback and it’s been fantastic for the AI markers to be able to step in and take care of some of that more mundane work so that instructors are freed up to have more critical conversations that are elevating that learning process.

There’s been a lot of worry I think about, and our instructor is going to be replaced by ai. And far from that, what we’ve seen is just a lot more of this sort of thing happening where the AI can step in and provide some of those foundational pieces. The instructor gets to leverage their expertise to then upskill it from there to be able to provide so much more additional expertise on top of some of this foundational work that the AI is able to automate and provide. Alright, and then one final question here that we wanted to ask was are students spending less time of AI markers? We were very hopeful that being able to provide these additional comments would serve as a stimulus for students to be able to consider their video in ways that they hadn’t before. I mean, Erin alluded to it earlier that I practiced in GoReact myself.

And yeah, there was elements of self-reflection there where I uploaded this video of me giving this speech and then ran through it and then ran through it, ran through all the AI markers to see what was saying, and it led to some really good critical thinking and consideration on my end. And luckily we saw that with students as well. We were seeing self-reflection time going up almost a hundred percent. Students are spending almost twice as much time in those critical self-reflection moments, moments, spending that additional time really thinking through what they were doing, how they were doing it, and providing a lot more opportunities to learn and critically evaluate what they want to change in the future or what was done especially well.

Okay. And then one final quote I wanted to share with this was that from Dr. Keith Walters, he was sharing a story about how through a combination of self-reflection from the student and dialogue and discussions between he and his student that he had this moment of, and then after we realized this problem, we were able to have this very rich conversation that was a life-changing moment for that candidate. And coming back to that human touch that’s been so important for GoReact in the past and continues to be so important for it into the future, seeing that these sorts of moments are being facilitated, these aren’t moments that GoReact can provide by itself, but these are moments that GoReact can help facilitate is having those really, really meaningful conversations that have the capability to change the lives of people, to have students learn so many new and different ways that move us far beyond a lot of these basics. And so it’s been fantastic and just wildly exciting for us to see how all of this is coming together.

Alright, so that was a lot of customer quotes, a lot of stats that we shared with you. What does all this mean and bringing this together, what this really means is better student outcomes. GoReact has been a fantastic tool for years and the AI assistant has served as a really phenomenal way to supercharge a lot of those interactions. And so without the AI assistant though, we’re seeing less feedback with delays, but with the AI assistant, we’re seeing more feedback for students and it’s coming in faster Without the AI assistant, we’re seeing unguided self-reflection with the AI assistant, we’re seeing more effective self-reflection and student engagement without the AI assistant, we’re seeing more instructor time focused on basic tasks. But with the AI assistant, we’re seeing more time for higher order discussions and guidance. Those key human moments are better able to be facilitated through the use of tools and technology that help us understand the value of the basics and then still be able to move into those really deep expertise areas that provide so much value. And so it’s been exciting to see how the AI assistant has been able to enable a lot of that.

Alright, so like I mentioned, I’m a product person and we in product never like to sit still, so we’re always asking ourselves what’s next? And I wanted to take a few moments to share some of what’s next on our end as well. The first thing is I want to talk about a few different type of AI markers. The first one is AI self-reflection prompts is what we’re calling them. And our AI markers so far to date have been very much, here’s something that was done well or something that could be improved that praise and improve dynamic. And we’re going to be introducing some question dynamics instead. So instead of telling the student this was done well or here’s how you might improve it, we’re just going to be instead asking questions and related to a specific topic. And so it might be something like engagement, how did you engage with the audience to keep them interested and focused on the topic?

This then gives the student the opportunity to have even more directed seeing students spending more time in that self-reflection time. And that’s been fantastic to see, but I think there’s additional opportunities for us to even further guide that learning behavior, that self-reflection that’s happening. And our hope is that this is going to lead to better dialogue as well with instructors where you can see a student’s response on here’s how they want to answer this question about what’s going to be happening here. And then it gives you an opportunity as well to chime in and add that next layer on top of that self-reflection to say, and here’s how you take it even farther, here’s how you get even better at this skill. And we’re hopeful that this is going to enable a lot more a of these opportunities. And then as well, we have a batch of additional AI markers coming in for teacher education.

We’ve had a few customers have preliminary access to this already while we are finishing out some of the quality changes on our end. But those are going to be available across the entire application come beginning of May. So we’re excited to get that into everyone’s hands. There’s a lot more specific categories within teacher education that we wanted to make sure that we addressed. The feedback that we receive from customers like yourselves about what types of behaviors you’re hoping to have identified and are important to you is simply fantastic. And that feedback we receive, we can’t always act on it immediately, but it is something that we are working on in the background constantly to be able to provide that additional value.

Alright, and then another set of features that I wanted to be able to share, the first off is the comment composer. So this is going to be a tool to help craft comments and this is going to be only for instructors. We are not opening this up to students, I just wanted to make that very, very clear. But it’s going to start with either a few words from the instructor or even a marker or a combination of the two. And those can be your individual markers that you use for your activities. And then it will from there, be able to generate a comment taking into context what’s going on in that video as well. And then providing a more robust comment and adding a lot more detail. And so with these examples that you see right here, these are real examples that we’ve been able to see out in the wild we’ll say of our preliminary testing. And so we’re excited to be able to get that available for you as quickly as we can.

An additional piece that we’re looking into are AI insights slash summary. And so this is moving in the the direction of, earlier in the presentation I mentioned that there were over 20 markers from the AI that came in and that can at times be overwhelming. And so we wanted to create a tool to help focus on the most critical pieces of those feedback. And so this is going to be an additional layer, an additional tool to help focus in collaboration with the instructor, focus on those most important pieces of feedback so that the student can really make sure that they are focused on and absorbing the most valuable pieces of feedback, both in praise and improve. And so we’re excited to keep working towards that.

And then the final piece that we’re working on right now is exploring visual elements, everything. A lot of what we’ve done so far is just very, very transcript focused, but there’s the entire image side of the video that we haven’t been able to do as much as we want that we’ve wanted to yet. So I can’t announce anything specific quite yet on this one, but know that this is a top area for us. There’s a lot of different directions we’re exploring with this and we will continue to make this a priority. Our end. We know how much value that this provides for you.

Alright, so looping back in summary on this, the AI assistant is facilitating more insights for accelerated skill mastery. It’s facilitating more self-reflection for empowered learners, more feedback in less time and more irreplaceable human moments. Building this feature, it was really exciting to work with different technologies and so it was fun from that standpoint, but those irreplaceable human moments are really what have helped separate this in my mind from so many other features that we’ve built because it’s facilitating so much more meaningful connection and meaningful outcomes for students. And so it’s been absolutely amazing and exciting to see all of this coming together. And then one final point was just that looping back on what’s coming soon, we’re looking at self-reflection prompts, we’re looking at comment composer, we’re looking at a lot of other things. The advanced package, the AI assistant is not stationary. It’s going to keep growing and changing and evolving and we’re really excited to have all of you with us to be able to be a part of that journey.

And then one final thing I wanted to mention is please try it for yourself. We have an AI tryout available inside of the application. There’s some buttons in there for you to be able to choose a course and sign up for it. Even if you know your school, there’s not a chance that you’re going to be doing it. Please use the future anyway. We’d love for you to be able to use it. It helps us a great deal to see how you’re using it and the value that it provides. So please explore it, give it a try. We’re excited to have that be a part of your daily lives and help wherever we can. One caveat that I do need to provide about this is that it’s not currently available for student pay, however, you can get around that by signing up through GoReact.com and creating a new account and then you’ll be able to access the full suite of those AI tools. So that is what I was hoping to cover today. There’s a few minutes left for questions. If people have any, I’d love to hear that.

Erin Stanley:

Yeah, Adam, we’ve had a few great questions come through. Barb says she’s currently piloting the AI assistant with her high school teachers love the pacing analytic, use it often with the teachers, even had a teacher set a goal to decrease their pacing since they had a number of new to country students as well as special education students. Love to hear that, Barb. She did say, I haven’t found the hedging words data point meaningful. Was it designed for pre-service teachers, student teachers, Barb? I would probably say this is a tool used a lot in the communication space, but Adam can speak more

Adam Jordan:

To that. Yes. Yeah, Aaron, you are exactly right. The primary use for that was communication. Here I am using filler words. The hedging words are not even necessarily things that you want to eliminate, like filler words, but they are just an element that helps you have more awareness around how you are using your language.

Erin Stanley:

Here’s another question. Is it possible for an admin to see how much the faculty are editing the feedback before it goes to the students? Is that part of the analytics on our end?

Adam Jordan:

That is not available today, but I’m expecting that to be available probably by the end of the month.

Erin Stanley:

I amazing. Here’s a technical question,

Adam Jordan:

Adam,

Erin Stanley:

I’ll do the best we can with this one. Is it possible to apply different AI markers to different activities, basically assign certain markers to certain videos that are uploaded? I feel like I have to create a new folder with different AI markers and then reload that video to the folder. Am I missing a shortcut here?

Adam Jordan:

No. Yeah. So the activity, it’s one set of markers that are being applied for all videos. And part of that pain point that you’re alluding to is something that we wanted to solve with that AI insights thing that I talked about before where it’s, Hey, let’s go ahead and run more markers, let’s run a ton of them, and then let’s just say this student needs these two, this student student needs this one. And being able to just really guide and refocus onto that because that’s a pain point that we’ve seen as well is students have individual needs and we need those. We need the insights and the areas of focus to be individual to them. So definitely a great question and it’s something we’re hoping to solve soon.

Erin Stanley:

That’s great. Adam, we always get questions around security. Could you speak for just a second about that and I know we can share some resources in the chat as well.

Adam Jordan:

Yeah, absolutely. So Gore’s full suite of security compliance, copa, ferpa, hipaa, everything, everything under that Sun SOC two compliance, all of that is in place for the Base GoReact application. And then everything that we’ve added with advanced, all of our AI content falls into that same umbrella. Any of the data that’s being given to us is not being used for additional training with any of the different technologies that we’re using. And so yeah, all of those same compliances are still very much in place today.

Erin Stanley:

Yeah, that’s a big deal. That’s really awesome that your team has kept all those security and privacy high standards in place. One more question here. As an admin that helps manage videos, where can I find the videos? Do the faculty need to give me access or should I already be able to find them myself? By having admin access,

Adam Jordan:

By having admin access, you should be able to access all of the courses within your organization and all of those videos there. So that is something that should be accessible to you. If you’re going through an LMS, you’ll need to launch into that LMS launch through those activities to find those videos. If you’re going through GoReact.com, then there’s a dashboard that you’ll be able to navigate to look at those different courses and those different videos.

Erin Stanley:

Amazing. Well, we’re at time there. If anyone else has other questions that you didn’t get answered, please reach out to us. I just want to say I try so many AI tools and I’m so impressed with our entire product team, how they have just used AI to make learning more meaningful. Meaningful is a word Adam used quite a bit. And it’s just the perfect word for this because it’s not trying to replace anything, it’s not trying to get rid of that human element, as Adam mentioned. And it really has been a meaningful addition to what GoReact can do. So kudos to the entire product team. You guys have done a really nice job with that. So next we have more sessions, K 12 teacher, ed, a SL, higher ed. So stick around because there are lots of great sessions for the rest of the day. And don’t forget to head over to the expo. Our friends from Mosaic are there who have some amazing teacher education strategies and helps also see Ben who can talk to you all things competency-based education at all different levels. And of course, our friend, our GoReact colleagues are going to be there as well and can answer questions and give you more info. So stick around and we’ll see you back at the next session.