Top header image: Caitlin Mills, co-founder of AugmentED and associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology.
UMN Startup AugmentED Aims to Develop AI that Supports Student Success
AugmentED harnesses the combined strengths of educators, engineers, and researchers
How should teaching and learning be reimagined in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially for students whom our system has long failed? Answering this pressing, high-stakes question is the goal of AugmentED, an initiative recently co-founded by Department of Educational Psychology Associate Professor Caitlin Mills.
“Our hypothesis is that achieving student success in this era will depend on how well we understand and integrate the strengths of human educators and the strengths of AI,” says Mills, who also serves as AugmentED’s research and impact officer. “AugmentED is therefore developing a new research and development [R&D] model that will produce research insights about the best way to combine these strengths while simultaneously building novel AI-powered education tools and teaching strategies to move us closer to a more positive AI-human synergy future. We are particularly focused on reimagining the classroom for the future rather than automating current practices, and we will specifically focus on improving future-ready ‘human’ skills.”
AugmentED is a part of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), a national nonprofit launched in 2021. AERDF harnesses the power of research and development to unlock scientific breakthroughs and deliver research-backed solutions to pressing teaching and learning challenges.
AugmentED was founded by Sherry Lachman, the former head of social impact at OpenAI and former Biden and Obama White House policy official. She was completing an AERDF fellowship which was designed to help select who would run its next initiative. Mills became involved as a thought partner with AugmentED and eventually came to lead its research division. She is now operating part-time at AERDF and part-time running the Affect, Cognition, and Computation (ACC) Lab at the U. The ACC lab investigates engagement, spontaneous thought, and mind wandering through multi-method approaches including classic experimental studies as well as more typical computer science approaches like machine learning and data mining.
As Mills’s areas of interest include learning analytics and adaptive learning, her new endeavor fits very well within her wheelhouse. “AugmentED is a really exciting way that the research and methods I have done over the years can take shape at a larger scale,” she says.
AugmentED’s model is to bring educators, engineers, and researchers together to collaborate as true partners in the design of new tools and teaching playbooks, while creating new forms of R&D infrastructure to support future efforts. “Teams with all three of these folks from the beginning will be central to how we can think about designing and testing new roles of AI in the classroom that really lets us center the humanness that is critical to learning,” Mills says. “For example, through our R&D model, we will create ‘flowers’ that represent student- and teacher-facing tools as well as ‘soil’ that will support the development and measurement of future-ready skills that can be used across tools.”
By leveraging the skills and perspectives of educators, engineers, and researchers all at once, AugmentED hopes to:
- Reimagine the roles of educators by designing innovative and AI-enhanced approaches to teaching that will equip students with future-ready skills
- Co-design AI-powered tools alongside more effective teaching approaches to accelerate student learning and support teachers in their new roles
- Iterate on and refine innovations in classroom settings to ensure they are effective and scalable across learning contexts
- Generate research insights and share them widely, building an open community where educators, researchers, and technologists can learn from and build on these discoveries
“I think that any time you bring different disciplines together, something magical happens,” says Raquel Romano, AugmentED’s technology leader and another co-founder. “These three groups of people—educators, academic researchers in the learning sciences, and people who build technology—have very different experiences, training, and a different lens that we bring to a problem based on our profession. But all three are really needed if you’re thinking about technology in the classroom, especially AI.”
If there were only teachers, but no technology, sometimes great things would happen, but there would always be a question of what is missing, Romano explains. Teachers are already overburdened and shouldn’t be expected to come up with technological innovations. And if you have only researchers, some interesting theories are developed, but are they truly applicable in the day-to-day realities of a classroom? Finally, there are those who build the technology. If they don’t understand the principles behind it or the everyday realities of how it’s used, they are not going to construct good technology.
“When you have these three different motivations driving your decisions, the impact is beyond what any single or group of those people individually could do,” she says. “That is valuable.”
Romano holds a PhD in computer science from MIT and studied AI back when it was called machine learning. She came to AugmentED through Lachman, who she had connections with from both having worked for the federal government. “This is my first nonprofit,” Romano says. “Throughout my career, I’ve always been drawn to work that has some sort of positive social impact.”
Romano says AugmentED is not about just creating a killer app for a classroom or one piece of tech, but something deeper. “My hope is that as more teachers try the tools we build, they will share with their partners and we will in turn continue to listen and have them at the table,” she says. “An important part of our approach is to share the research that we do so others will be able to build off what we build. We’re not just elevating just the things we build, but the whole field.”
She adds that as a lifelong learner, she feels privileged to be working in this space. “I love going into a new field, learning about it, and bringing my expertise to bear on it," she says.
Mills concurs. “This initiative is very exciting as we think about ways to bridge cognitive science, education, and AI in new ways," she says.
–Kevin Moe
Mills photo: Courtesy of Department of Educational Psychology;
Teacher photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages, All4Ed