Microsoft Research India and teams across Microsoft jointly introduce the ‘Shiksha copilot’ project that aims to improve learning outcomes and empower teachers to create comprehensive, age-appropriate lesson plans combining the best available online resources, including textbooks, videos, classroom activities and student assessment tools, according to the official website.
Experts suggest that teachers around the world face many challenges, which vary from country to country or even within a city or town. But some challenges are universal, including time management, classroom organisation, and creating effective lesson plans.
As per the field experts, advances in AI present new opportunities to enhance teachers’ abilities and empower students to learn more effectively. That’s the goal of a new project from Microsoft Research, which uses generative AI to help teachers quickly develop personalised learning experiences, design assignments, create hands-on activities and more, while giving them back hours of time that they spend on daily planning today, as per the official announcement.
The interdisciplinary collaborative project aims to help curate resources, such as an AI-powered digital assistant—centred around teachers’ specific needs, which were identified right at the start through multiple interviews and workshops through the curation of the best available online resources, the statement added.
“Shiksha copilot includes a range of powerful features that address those challenges and enhance the educational experience. It’s grounded in specific curricula and learning objectives, to ensure that all generated content aligns with desired educational outcomes,” Akshay Nambi, principal researcher, Microsoft Research, said.
“This grounding is enabled by ingesting relevant data with the help of state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR), computer vision (CV) and generative AI models. It was also important to use natural language and support voice-based interactions while including options for English and Kannada speakers,” Nambi added.
Officials claim that the copilot is being developed as part of Project VeLLM (Universal Empowerment with Large Language Models) at Microsoft Research India. VeLLM’s aims is to make inclusive and accessible copilots available to everyone by building a platform for developing population-scale copilots.
“Extensive prompt designing, testing and rigorous responsible AI procedures, including content filtering and moderation, red team assessments and jailbreaking simulations, have been deployed to maximise safety and reliability. These measures are in place so that Shiksha copilot consistently produces factual and trustworthy content,” Tanuja Ganu, principal research SDE manager, Microsoft Research, said.