Automated curriculum alignment

• In Event: Curating Educational Content

Proposal

We are a non-profit organization that creates and supports software and pedagogical tools to enable equitable access to high-quality educational opportunities, with an emphasis on supporting effective education technology interventions in low-connectivity and offline contexts. With 33% of the world still not on the Internet, and in low-income countries only 14% having access and growth rates stagnating, that leaves 2.6 billion people cut off from the educational opportunities afforded by the Internet. Through our tools and programs, we’re boosting learning outcomes in some of the world's most challenging learning environments, supporting disconnected teachers and learners in refugee camps, rural schools, orphanages, and out-of-school programs.

One of the key lessons we’ve learned in our global work is the vital importance of curriculum alignment – the process of organizing, adapting, and contextualizing resources to the standards and learning objectives of the national curriculum or textbook relevant to the learners and educators being served by a program. Curriculum alignment is a critical ingredient in enabling discovery and use of materials to support effective learning, particularly when drawing from a diverse global library of Open Educational Resources.

Our open-source product suite includes a tool for easily aligning content from our library of nearly 200,000 open resources, along with one’s own materials, to specific curricular standards. While this process is more fluid than the spreadsheet-based methods many organizations rely on, it can still be tedious and time-consuming, and therefore expensive. Further deepening this challenge is the need to rapidly align content to a curricular standard to support continuity of edtech-enabled learning in response to crises such as lockdowns or displacement, and the ongoing burden of maintaining a large set of curriculum-aligned content as standards are adapted or replaced, and new content is introduced.

We began pursuing curriculum automation in 2017, and engaged in a series of consultations and design sessions with a broad range of stakeholders and experts. This past year, we’ve made significant progress in two key areas:
1. AI-powered automation of the process of digitizing curricular standards from raw source documents into machine-readable taxonomies that can be used within an educational platform.
2. Development of curricular recommendation machine learning models that match relevant content items from a large library to particular learning objectives within a curriculum.

We recently leveraged this approach to digitize a taxonomy of 2,194 distinct learning objectives for Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, for ten grade levels in the Ugandan curriculum, and align 12,000 learning resources to them. These materials are now being used by teachers, students, and out-of-school youth in disconnected communities in Uganda. A process that previously would have taken months of painstaking work costing hundreds of thousands of dollars was reduced to a matter of days, a couple of hundred dollars of API credits, and a few thousand dollars of expert review. This presentation will provide a reflection on this experience, including a replication in Arabic and for additional country contexts, as a critical component of the process to have curriculum aligned digital supplemental content.

Author

• Jamie Alexandre, Learning Equality