Leveraging AI to support the self-directed learning of disadvantaged youth in developing countries

2021

Conference Paper

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Globally 258 million children and youth do not have access to school (Unesco, 2019), while 600 million receive ineffective education (Unesco, 2017). Solve Education! (SE!) is a non-profit organization committed to enable these young people to empower themselves through education, and currently operates in over 7 countries. Their team includes educationists, technologists, and business executives, who work together with governments and local communities to reach young people with disadvantaged backgrounds. Solve Education!’s main mobile application “The Dawn of Civilisation” (DoC), is an open platform that can deliver different learning content, with the focus on English literacy. It is designed to support lower end devices, as well as offline learning. At the Rationality Enhancement Group, we are laying the scientific foundation for helping people do more good in better ways. We combine methods from computational cognitive science, psychology, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence for the development of practical tools, strategies, and interventions that support people in their personal growth. In our collaboration with SE!, we aim at learning from and contributing to real-world challenges by applying our research to enhance SE!’s learning platform. We are currently working on two projects. The first project’s goal is to develop a principled approach to incentivize efficient self-directed learning with digital educational resources and to evaluate its effectiveness regarding learners’ behaviors and success in cooperation with SE!. Specifically, SE!’s DoC serves as the digital educational resource and allows to evaluate the approach with very high ecological validity. The planned intervention is based on the concept of optimal brain points developed by Xu, Wirzberger & Lieder (2019). The core idea is to incentivize effort and smart study choices rather than performance and to do so in a way that learners cannot exploit shortcuts to accumulate game points without also moving closer to their actual learning goals. If successful, SE! can build upon the intervention to further enhance the benefits their users draw from DoC. The second project is based on hierarchical goal setting and consists of a digital assistant that helps users set real-world goals and make progress towards them by reaching milestones with DoC. In this talk, in addition to introducing our work together with SE, we will highlight the mutual benefits of the collaboration between scientists and socially impactful organizations.

@conference{PaulyTeoHeindrichAmoLieder2021LISA-Leveraging,
  title = {Leveraging AI to support the self-directed learning of disadvantaged youth in developing countries},
  author = {Teo, Janine and Pauly, Reena and Heindrich, Lovis and Amo, Victoria and Lieder, Falk},
  booktitle = {The first Life Improvement Science Conference},
  address = {Tübingen, Germany},
  month = jun,
  year = {2021},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {6}
}