Access to Educational Resources
Education is a public good and a foundational human right. However, the state of access to education worldwide is such that numerous individuals go without high-quality instruction or the ability to access information for their own self-guided learning. According to a report published by UNESCO (2022), about 244 million children and youth are out of school globally. To attempt to close this gap in access, it is estimated that an additional 69 million teachers must be recruited to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030. These figures, while daunting, are not insurmountable. Access to Educational Resources
Disparities in Access to Education
Advances in communication technology and digital sharing enable increasing access, but those gains are not totally distributed. Cost, for example, still plays a significant role in determining who has access to information and resources for schooling and education and who does not. There are disparities in access between school districts, individual schools within districts, and between families’ abilities to support their child’s education. To take an applied post-secondary example, the average cost of books and supplies per academic year per college student enrolled in 2021 was about $1,200-1,400 dollars.1
Numerous post-secondary students state they forgo the purchase of course materials due to high, prohibitive pricing.2 This is not a static figure that only applies to college students, but is indicative of a trend that affects the field of education more broadly. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016) reported an 88% increase in textbook costs between 2006 and 2016–outpacing the price of most other consumer goods, and placing pressure on students’ and school districts’ budgets for acquiring learning resources.
Connectivity Gaps
Beyond cost, there are gaps in connectivity and barriers to the effective adoption of instructional technologies that once surpassed may flatten many disparities to access. As K-12 school districts move away from one-size-fits-all models of instruction to more personalized, responsive, and differentiated models, the role of commercially published resources like textbooks are tempered by the adoption of supplemental resources, digital and otherwise. Nowhere should this more personalized, hands-on approach be evident than in technical education.
At a time when teacher recruitment must increase to close gaps in access, Gallup has reported a survey of “US Workers’ Burnout by Industry, 2022.” The report found that 44% of K-12 educators included in the survey stated that they “always or frequently” feel burned out at work. This rate is markedly higher than in other fields like the 32% of respondents in retail or the 25% in tech. Educators spend a significant amount of time developing engaging lessons, searching for relevant resources, and ensuring alignment with curriculum standards, but often this work is done outside of school hours and without due compensation. As such, there have been persistent declines in job satisfaction since the mid-2000s. As well as consistent shortages in key areas–special education, mathematics, science, foreign languages, and English as a second language.
Teacher attrition rates by type of institution (2016)
Ai is but one technology that will be foundational to addressing the above challenges and disparities. The problems facing education are myriad, and Ai will not address all of them (nor should it), but by taking the time to examine the Ai tools we may gain a better idea of what the technology can offer educators to be more effective, more efficient, and more creative, while also enabling us to see the tradeoffs and boundaries of the technology in the educational context.
Introducing Eduaide.Ai
Eduaide.Ai is a platform designed to address the challenges faced by educators in lesson development. It combines the generative power of large language models with the expertise and intuition of teachers through a user-friendly interface that both streamlines the process of creating engaging and personalized lessons while also providing the user with a deep level of customization through its modular design and granular controls for personalization and differentiation. Let’s delve into some of the key features and their use cases for technical schools that give Eduaide.Ai its utility.
First, however, it is important to address the skepticism that comes with Ai adoption. Yes, you are right to be concerned about the tradeoffs that will inevitably come with adopting this new technology. It is our hope that these concerns serve as the basis for lengthy conversations, and hours of study to better understand how the technology may be adopted with necessary safeguards to ensure best possible use cases. It is important that we get the adoption right through sensible policy and procedure.
At Eduaide.Ai we believe in a human-in-the-loop design that gives the user broad based control over the Ai outputs, as well as the ability to shape those outputs to better meet the needs of students. In short, modular design, granular control for the user, and open access are central to the identity of Eduaide.Ai, and ought to be central to other Ai offerings.
The workflow for Eduaide.Ai is built on three actions–source it, shape it and share it.
Source It: Leverage the power of large language models through a curated prompting system to turn your words—your ideas—into the basis for effective and flexible educational resources. We offer over 50 different resource types for a variety of subjects that teachers can engage with through specifying the topic of study, standard to be addressed, objective to be met, or some keywords relating to what you want to do.
Shape It: Engage with a suite of personalization features to differentiate and adapt educational resources to fit your unique context—adjust a text’s reading level, translate materials, extract keyword glossaries, develop a sequence of logical headings, chunk texts, add targeted questions, and much more. Use the Eduaide Chat functionality to take even greater manual control over the Ai model and prompt it yourself, or follow-up content generations with questions to deepen your understanding of the content matter.
Share It: Cultivate expertise and collaborate with other users. Share educational resources with a community of practice to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute to find what works best.
Use Case for Technical Schools
Let’s explore how Eduaide.AI can benefit a technical school through a specific use case. Here are some screenshots showcasing its capabilities.
Lesson Seed
With the input of a topic, keyword, or standard you can generate a taxonomy of objectives, options for teaching strategies, cue sets, activities, assignments, ways to encourage real-world applications, and closure questions.
Reading Comprehension
Technical fields are constantly evolving, with new discoveries and advancements occurring regularly. By developing strong reading comprehension skills, students can keep up with the latest developments in their field of study. With Eduaide.Ai you can generate numerous, content specific reading comprehension assignments with informative texts and questions.
STEM Activities
Technical schools often focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Eduaide.AI offers a wide range of STEM activities. Enabling educators to incorporate hands-on experiments, coding projects, and simulations into their lessons, fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
To summarize, Eduaide.Ai is a tool created by two classroom teachers designed to genuinely help teachers. We understand that educators’ workloads are immense. We hope that by leveraging state of the art technology we help in any capacity. Saving time during the planning process, improving the quality of content available to students. Allowing expert teachers to express their creativity to the next level. Eduaide.Ai is that tool that every teacher should see. Help us help teachers everywhere and tell someone about Eduaide.Ai.
Sources: Access to Educational Resources
- Jaggars, S. S., Rivera, M. D., and Akani, B. (2019). College Textbook Affordability: Landscape, Evidence, and Policy Directions [Policy Report]. Midwestern Higher Education Compact. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=costs+of+college+textbooks&id=ED598412
Ma, J, and Pender, M. (2021). Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2021. Trends in Higher Education Series. New York: College Board.
- Bol, L., Esqueda, M. C., Ryan, D., & Kimmel S. C. (2022). A comparison of academic outcomes in courses taught with open educational resources and publisher content. Educational Researcher, 51(1), 17-26.
Fischer, L., Hilton III, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional
study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(3), 159–172.
Hilton III, J., Fischer, L., Wiley, D. & Williams, L. (2016a). Maintaining Momentum Toward Graduation: OER and the Course Throughput Rate. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(6), 18–27. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2686
OECD (2021), Education at a Glance 2021: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris,