This bespoke newsletter is in addition to the monthly AI in Education newsletter to keep you updated on progress of DfE & DSIT AI Education Content Store Project we are involved in.
AI Education Content Store
MONTHLY NEWSLETTER #2 - JANUARY 2025
This newsletter aims to keep you updated on the development of the AI Education Content Store, commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
In this edition:
Can you help us: We’d love to hear from interested schools and teachers
Project in development: What the content store will look like for users
FAQs: ‘What are the benefits of the content store for schools?’
Meet the Team: Rob Rankin, lead product manager at Faculty AI
Who are we working with? Preparing for the upcoming hackathon
Coming Up: Dates for the diary
Can you help us?
We are starting to work with schools to gather content for the AI Education Content Store, and we’re very keen for all interested schools to be able to participate.
If you’d like to be involved, please email: content-store-programme@faculty.ai
The Project in Development:
The AI Education Content Store now has an interface that will enable users to access and explore its content.
A landing page allows users to explore the content store directly, or to access it via an API, which is a set of instructions that allows different software programs to communicate with one another.
This landing page will also eventually include a link to a glossary of terms used in the content store, as well as details of how the content is enriched.
In order to move beyond the landing page, users will need to log in, either via the Department for Education or through onegov.uk. (For this month’s hackathon, users will be given an API key that allows them access.) Real data will not be added to the searchable database until these authentication measures are in place.
The content will be arranged under one of four headings: datasets, requirements, assessments and guidance. So, for example, national curriculum learning objectives will be filed under “requirements”, while assessment frameworks from the Standards and Testing Agency will be filed under “assessments”.
The content will be labelled and tagged in a number of ways. A lesson plan on Ada Lovelace, for example, would be labelled with the relevant year groups (Year 10 and Year 11), with key words (“indices” and “powers”) and with tags (“key stage 4”, “guidance”). Its broader taxonomy will be “mathematics”, “developfluency” and “numbersystem”, and it will also be labelled “person”, with the specific value “Ada Lovelace”.
The aim is to make the content fully searchable against any of these fields. Search requests will be able to specify “must have”, “should have” and “must not have”.
Developers interacting with the AI Education Content Store will access the data via HTTP requests, rather than by using the “Explore” feature – the explorer is intended more as a shop window, offering a user-friendly insight into the content of the store.
Similarly, the “Upload content” area of the site will be easy to use for anyone wanting to upload material – it should be as simple as uploading a file to Google Docs. When uploading data, content-store users will be asked to confirm that they have parent or student consent to share the content – and they can revoke consent at any time, removing the data from the content store.
FAQs:
‘The AI Education content store has obvious benefits for edtech companies. But what about for schools – is there anything in it for us?’
Answer: Because all the content in the AI Education Content Store has been quality assured, labelled and optimised, any edtech products built using it are likely to be better quality than those built simply using raw data or general-purpose LLMs, such as ChatGPT. In addition, because DfE and DSIT have funded the assembly and optimisation of the content store, they are reducing barriers to entry for people wanting to build quality products for schools. This means greater innovation for pupils and teachers at less cost to schools, helping their budgets go further.
In the longer term, DfE are keen to explore how content produced by teachers and pupils can be managed in the best interests of the education sector. The recent consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence - GOV.UK highlights that DfE will be engaging with pupils, parents, teachers and schools to help shape solutions.
Meet the Team:
What is your role?
I’m a lead product manager. My job is to ensure that the product we’re developing meets user needs. I work with the team to help define and prioritise what we are delivering.
We use different methods to learn what people want from the AI Education Content Store and how to go about developing it:
User research: Sessions with potential end users help us to understand what users are trying to achieve, as well as the problems that they’re facing. We use this information to form hypotheses about how the content store could help them.
Testing and experimentation: We use early versions of our solutions to test our hypotheses and gain insight into how they might work in a real-life context. As we’re currently in a pilot phase, we’re experimenting with different ways to enrich and optimise the content, then testing these with the content-provider and schools reference groups. We are also working closely with the edtech reference groups to test how they could use the data in the store. We’ll be testing how those things come together during our series of hackathons.
The other part of my role is to think about the future, building an understanding of how the product can evolve over time. I work with users and other key stakeholders to create a vision, and a roadmap of how to get there.
What’s your background?
I started my career in political campaigning – but quickly realised it wasn’t for me. I moved into education, working for a charity that supported schools with citizenship and political education. From there, I joined an edtech startup, writing a course to teach young people how to build apps. We needed to build a digital platform to be able to deliver the course at scale – which is how I discovered that I enjoyed designing and developing digital products and services.
I have been a product manager for 15 years, working in a variety of contexts. This included eight years at the Government Digital Service, with a stint as head of product for GOV.UK, delivering information and services to millions of people every day. While there, I supported people through the pandemic, providing up-to-date information and rapidly spinning up services that helped meet emerging needs.
I joined Faculty last year. The content store is an ideal first project for me, bringing together my experience in edtech and in delivering large-scale products and services.
What do you enjoy about working on the AI Education Content Store?
We’re breaking new ground, and that throws up fascinating challenges and opportunities. I also enjoy bringing different communities together: the people who develop what we teach; the people who teach it; the students who are taught; and the edtech companies developing solutions to support those groups.
What do you do when you’re not working on the content store?
I enjoy renovating and refurbishing vintage bikes, seeing live music, playing and watching football and going for big walks that end in cosy pubs. Though I don’t have time for much of that at the moment, as I’m currently renovating a house.
Who are we working with?
This month, we’ll be holding the first of three AI Education Content Store hackathons, bringing representatives of edtech companies into the Faculty AI offices for two days, and giving them opportunities to work hands-on with the content store.
Participants will be members of our edtech reference group, as well as edtech companies that have been working with us during our early user research. Also participating will be the Department for Education AI for Education tools’ competition winners: AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity - GOV.UK
Ministers are also expected to attend, to observe the event.
What will the hackathon involve?
At the start of the hackathon, we will ask participants to consider a series of education-focused problem statements, which they could potentially address using the AI Education Content Store.
While the problem statements haven’t yet been drawn up, they will follow a format similar to this question: “Year 6 students often find traditional maths lessons and assessments unengaging, leading to lower enthusiasm for the subject. The challenge is to create an interactive and personalised maths-revision tool that aligns with the Year 6 curriculum, while making fun and improving comprehension.”
All problem statements will be deliberately broad, so that participants will not need to share any commercially sensitive information.
Participants will initially use large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude AI, to produce responses to these problem statements. These responses will be kept, so that participants can later compare them with the responses they produce once they have been given access to the AI Education Content Store.
Once they have been given access to the content store, participants will conceive and test ideas for addressing their problem statements.
At the end of the two-day hackathon, groups of attendees will deliver presentations on ways in which the content store has improved their ability to address the problem.
Because attendees will have varying levels of technical expertise, facilitators from the Faculty AI team, including data scientists and machine-learning engineers, will offer support where necessary.
What are the aims of the hackathon?
There are several aims:
1. Engagement: We want to gather feedback on how different people access and use the content store. This will help inform the future design and build of the store, as well as improvements over time.
2. Data sharing: We hope people from different organisations will be excited the potential of the content store and will want to share their content with us before the next hackathon.
3. Optimisation: How useful is the optimised content to users? Does optimisation make it easier for users to retrieve the information they need?
4. Gathering insight: What needs to be added to the content store as a priority? What should be added in the next six months, the next year or the next five years?
Coming Up...
30-31 January: First hackathon, in which developers will collaborate on tasks, using a selection of content from the AI Education Content Store.
February: First meeting of the newly formed Teacher Reference Group.
February: Second meetings of multi-academy trust, college, school, edtech and content-provider reference groups.
Got a Question for the Core Delivery Team?
email us at: content-store-programme@faculty.ai
