NFeedback - improving online learning outcomes

NFeedback will use AI, especially Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV) and Knowledge Graphs (KG) to create both live and offline feedback for Note Taking Express's current digital classroom solution. In an online teaching environment, many interactions are missed compared with traditional classroom teaching, such as the number of attendees, students' facial emotions, body language etc. These AI services will provide valuable information on non-verbal emotions and signals. Then based on each user's profile, automatic feedback can be generated for teachers and students, together with suggested improvements and support.

KG (sometimes also referred to as Ontology) is a technology which structurally describes the concepts and relations between concepts, so that AI systems can spot patterns of data and give connections within the data. This reasoning process offers feedback to HEI administrators, teachers and students. Accessibility is an important component of the feedback to consider diversity of learning styles. If it's an online lecture, for example, a deaf student may require Closed Captioning turned on whereas a visually impaired student may need text to speech to read out text on the screen or description of images.

At a more granular level we will be structuring a number of work packages to collect more information about the lecture to feed into the KG, so that our AI solution can decide what needs to be feedback to school admins, lecturers and students. We will be collaborating with University of Southampton (UoS) to obtain the data from open datasets (Southampton Open Data Service, for example), and other clients current course management systems, such as BlackBoard or Moodle.

Following the above, we will use lecture audio/video content recorded from our existing digital classroom solution and generate a semi-structured data store for further analysis. From this we can further enhance the NLP and CV modules to prepare data that is needed for automatic feedback.

Current solutions, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams are difficult to use in a blended (online/offline) teaching environment and designed mainly for meetings and conferences. BlackBoard Collaborate has been widely used for online teaching, however the cost of the software and the complexity of both the setup and UI have been a cause of frustration for many users. Fundamentally these solutions lack accessibility for neurodiverse learners and any form of personalised feedback. NFeedback will therefore be designed as a simple to use interactive cloud-based software service, which captures lectures securely for all students, including feedback content for students and accessibility tools.

It is likely that the implementation of social distancing and new technology will increase overheads significantly for HEIs as they seek to put in place COVID-19 mitigation measures. NFeedback is seeking to solve this problem directly by providing AI supported assessment and feedback systems for students with different backgrounds and learning preferences and to recreate, at least in part, the engagement and experiential component of learning which in-class and on campus courses deliver at an affordable price point.