Smart tutors are the next generation of mobile learning apps. Unlike traditional apps that people use to learn on the go, smart tutors are enhanced by AI and designed to manage entire courses for students.
The idea behind smart tutors is to provide a learning experience that is similar to experiences that students have with human tutors. But instead of a human, there is an AI algorithm managing the course, giving grades, evaluating progress, and defining the next assignments.
In this post:
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Smart tutor definition
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Five benefits of smart tutors for students
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Six components of smart tutor applications
What is a Smart Tutor App?
A smart tutor app is a mobile that acts as an educator in the teaching process. Quite like human tutors, smart tutors also manage learning materials to adapt courses to individual learning needs, explain topics to students, and generate tests according to students’ goals and performance.
So, how does it differ from a typical mobile learning app? The main difference is that a smart tutor uses artificial intelligence (AI) to manage learning materials and personalize learning for students. Traditional learning apps also have personalization capabilities, but AI does the job on a more sophisticated level.
What Are The Benefits of Smart Tutors?
Smart tutors can make a lot of difference for students. Here are some of the most important benefits so far.
1. More Personalized Learning Paths
Unlike traditional learning apps that move the user down one of the predetermined paths, smart tutors use AI to choose the most useful material from the available content. So, there are no pre-set learning paths that students must follow every time.
This is possible thanks to the “decision tree” modeling, an AI modeling approach used to predict the value of material for learners. The “tree” defines the learning path by answering simple yes/no questions related to the user’s performance.
Here’s an example of a decision tree in machine learning. This one illustrates a basic flow for the decision-making process for the question “Is it going to rain?”
Decision tree that machine learning algorithms use. Credit: Towards Data Science
The questions in the “decision tree” in a smart tutor relate to performance. For example, if a student received a certain grade for an assignment, the app will evaluate the progress and define the next step by evaluating the answer about their result.
2. 24/7 Student Support
Unlike human tutors who are available to students during business hours, smart tutors can help users 24/7. A student can resume learning at any time they need with the same level of support. This support is often provided by conversational interfaces like chatbots.
A chatbot, an app that simulates a conversation with a human, can answer students’ questions 24/7. Smart tutor apps can come with two main types of chatbots: rule-based and AI.
A rule-based chatbot can answer only predefined questions with pre-made answers (kinda like FAQs). An AI-enabled chatbot can answer more complex questions without preparation thanks to machine learning that looks for “clues” in users’ messages.
So, having a chatbot and other supporting materials can help students stay in touch with their “virtual” tutors when they need an answer.
3. Personalized Progress Assessment
A smart tutor defines assessment tests based on a student’s performance. The app might contain a few versions of evaluations for different progress levels, and it will choose one after reviewing previous evaluations as well as how easily the student solves problems.
The learner will also be informed about the choice of evaluation test as well as the difficulty of the subsequent learning materials. This functionality pretty much resembles the behavior of a human tutor, which makes the learning process with a smart tutor more familiar.
4. More Accessible Learning
Smart tutors can work on any device, so a student can learn in any setting they find comfortable. So, learning is not restricted to classrooms or specific hours (like it would be in the case with remote learning). This makes smart tutors a great option for safe learning during the pandemic.
5. Higher Student Engagement
Smart tutors can use gamification to engage learners and help them achieve better educational outcomes. Gamification means using game design elements in an educational context to motivate action, engage, and promote learning.
Scholarly research confirmed that gamification results in higher student engagement and academic achievement. Accordingly, learners tend to respond very positively to gamified exercises and love the element of interactivity and teamwork.
Smart tutors are compatible with gamification. They can contain just about any type of gamified exercise in any course, which means they aren’t limited to one format. Such exercises as puzzles, interactive experiments, team games, and challenges can be very effective at engaging learners.
Components of Smart Tutor Apps
Now, let’s see how a smart tutor app works to provide the benefits we just mentioned. We’re going to review the “architecture” of such an app, or simply, its components.
The most important components of smart tutors are:
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Student database — includes personal data of students, including their demographics, learning goals, skills, historical data on learning, schedule preferences, and grade. A smart tutor relies on this data to make content decisions, recommendations of exercises, and progress evaluations
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Content — this is a structured content database that contains course materials (texts, images, files, etc.) and relationships between topics. Typically created by a human educator, this database is necessary for the smart tutor to create a personalized learning plan
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Question bank — this component contains feedback based on a user’s progress and assignment results. A smart tutor uses a question bank to generate recommendations for the next assignments with a machine learning algorithm.
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Expert model — contains an algorithm that defines a user’s knowledge level and chooses the difficulty for assignments and questions. This also involves an algorithm for processing assignment and test results and analyzing progress
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User interface — like any other mobile app, a smart tutor contains a learner-friendly UI, which in turn involves a personal account, learning schedule, chatbots, performance analytics dashboard, user surveys, and even an internal search engine.
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Course manager tool — this component manages the rest by defining the relationships between them. For example, if a student passes a part of a course successfully, the course manager updates their personal data, chooses content for further learning, and changes their knowledge level.
All these components are required to create a smart tutor application for learning.
The course manager tool and the expert model are two main parts that differentiate smart tutors from traditional learning apps. Although both require extra resources for the creation, they help create an application that will be more personalized and useful for learners than a traditional one.
Smart Tutor Apps: Summary
A smart tutor app is an application that tries to replicate the learning experience with a human tutor with AI. Like a human educator, an AI-enabled algorithm manages and personalizes learning to engage students.
The main difference between a traditional learning application and a smart tutor is the use of AI technology to manage the learning process. That technology makes learning more personalized, engaging, and flexible, even compared to popular mobile learning apps.