Assessment, AI, and the race for the future

With AI, assessment is finally ready to enter its space age.

Change is in the air for learning. Not in some vague, squint-your-eyes-to-see-it kind of way, but in a very real sense. 

The appetite for it has been there for some time but it’s being voiced more frequently and in more places, whether in K12, higher education, workplace training, or specific subject areas.

Although separate learning markets have different needs, they share common ground: assessment is a critical part of the learning lifecycle. Change is vital if we’re to meet the evolving needs of learners—authentic, compliant, inclusive, accessible, flexible, personal.

If these concerns sound familiar, it’s because we’ve heard them before.

Back in 2020 when the pandemic ravaged all sense of normalcy, the shortcomings in education’s infrastructure were laid bare. To borrow a phrase from Warren Buffet, it was only when the tide went out that you saw who’d been swimming naked all along.

Back then, digital was hastily adopted as a shock absorber, and the industry was forced to do something it had never done before—evolve at pace.

Dealing with disruption—the shift to digital-first assessment

For most, this would have been extremely difficult if not for the existing solutions that made a rapid switch to digital possible.

Learnosity was one of those solutions. As an early pioneer of API and cloud technologies in edtech, our products helped customers transition to digital with the high-end, battle-tested infrastructure they needed to deliver online assessment at scale.

For our customers, the migration to digital helped them modernize by default, with crucial improvements to areas like UI and accessibility, question type variety, data security, performance analytics, and so on.

The range of benefits and capabilities not only changed how authors created assessments, but how end users experienced and engaged with them. 

But that was then. Expectations are ever-changing, as we know, and in just a few short years these things have gone from being differentiators to table stakes.

AI has entered the chat

The change we’re seeing now feels different. AI represents both the biggest threat the education industry has seen in 10 years—and its biggest opportunity in 100 years. It gives learning and assessment a way to quantum leap from the Industrial Age to the Space Age.

The change we’re seeing now feels different. AI represents both the biggest threat the education industry has seen in 10 years—and its biggest opportunity in 100 years. Share on X

The big tech players are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the build-out for AI adoption at scale. More data centers, more advanced hardware. That alone is enough to tell you which way the wind is blowing. 

We’ve seen clear interest among customers too. 

Driving motivations included the growth of remote (i.e. digital) assessment, the challenges of effective measurement as learner needs grow more complex, and the additional challenge of tackling AI-driven cheating.

Meeting needs that are emerging in response to AI is one thing, but what’s really exciting is the vast potential AI has to stimulate a new wave of innovations in edtech.

The race for the future is on

In any highly competitive market there are winners and losers. This will be no different.

To thrive in this new environment, every company must have an AI strategy that they can activate quickly. Without one, each sales cycle that passes puts organizations further behind the curve and falling ever-shorter of customer expectations for more, faster, better.

In any highly competitive market there are winners and losers. This will be no different. Share on X

It won’t be easy for everyone. Turning raw generative AI capabilities into high-quality products with a strong market fit takes a huge amount of engineering—amounting to significant cost, time, and risk of failure. 

While organizations are figuring out how to get up and running with AI, their products are standing still and available market is shrinking.

Putting AI’s promise into practice

Learnosity is lucky to have very strong customer partnerships. Their feedback shapes our thinking and activities, and when they speak we listen.

These long-term, two-way relationships have helped us accumulate unrivalled subject matter expertise in assessment down the years. Along with our deep bench of developer talent, it puts us in a great position to know exactly where AI can add real value for product builders, authors, educators, and learners.

Of course the proof is in the pudding.

Learnosity’s first step into AI with Author Aide, an award-winning productivity tool for assessment content creators, made an immediate impression with customers. The great response we got from that release validated our decision to go all-in on AI with a sizable R&D investment.

To better help our customers go from “where to start with AI?” to “where to next with AI?”, we grew our global headcount with AI Labs—a 30-strong team of developers and AI specialists who are solely focused on bringing era-defining AI products to market.

Attracting the talent you need to create standard-setting products isn’t easy. It’s a competitive market, and it’s only getting more competitive. Our success with AI Labs is payoff for the hard work that’s gone into creating a strong employer brand and innovation-driven company culture. (High-profile plaudits don’t hurt either, like this one or this one 😉.)

We want to catapult customers to the frontline of change by putting AI’s promise into practice.  Share on X

From the beginning, Learnosity’s mission has been to advance education and learning worldwide with best-in-class technology. That extends to AI. We want to catapult customers to the frontline of change by putting AI’s promise into practice. 

And there are countless ways we can do that. While some industries might be scrambling to find how AI can add real end-user value, education isn’t one of them. 

Decades of underinvestment, hard-coded educational practices, and outdated software have resulted in a number of critical shortcomings. AI gives us a way of finding new solutions to many longstanding problems, such as:

• Teacher attrition
  Educators are the hardest-working people in the industry. Excessive workloads, long hours, and high stress have led to a concerning level of burnout, which has been linked to low learner achievement. It’s also getting harder to attract people to the profession, with the UN issuing a global alert over teacher shortage. There are countless ways AI can help stem the tide. Learnosity has already deployed it in products aimed at high-impact areas like content authoring and essay grading, both of which will reduce teacher workloads in a big way.
• Learner engagement
  Poor engagement is a recurring theme in the research on learning loss. Online distraction and a disconnection with learning content are clear impediments. Put simply, if you want learners’ attention, you’ve got to earn it. Learnosity’s assessment engine already lets you create dynamic, interactive experiences, but customers can now also leverage AI through our tool Feedback Aide to deliver detailed (and fully customizable) learner feedback to better serve individual learners’ needs.

These are the areas that AI is changing today. The future will see countless more, resulting in lighter workloads, greater focus, more control, and better learning outcomes.

We’re riding the wave of these changes at Learnosity, and making them more cost-effective and risk-free for customers in the process.

See how Learnosity is already shipping your AI roadmap, starting with Feedback Aide, our new AI-assisted grading and feedback product. Click the image to view the webinar recording 👇