Hot AWS EdStart Startups: Improving student outcomes through personalized learning

AWS EdStart Members are on a mission to bridge the personalized learning gap between students and educational institutions through artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platforms built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These organizations are enabling students to follow their own learning pathways across writing, math, and reading, at their own pace, anytime, and anywhere.

Learn about three AWS EdStart Members and how they adapt to student learning and virtually assist self-study.

Using social and gamification elements to make learning fun and engaging

Joni.AI is an AI-powered adaptive math learning and assessment platform. It generates personalized math questions and learning materials for students using AI. Social and gamification elements are deployed to make learning more fun and engaging. According to Joni.AI, students are 125% more engaged using Joni.Ai compared to studying with most assessment books.

With a vision of helping students learn without anxiety, the Singapore-based Joni.AI helps students make sense of their learning data while personalizing the experience for each. The team uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to deploy their infrastructure and train their machine learning (ML) models and AWS Amplify to deploy their front-end client and website.

“We wanted to create a personalized learning profile for each of our students in the academic support program that we were volunteering at. We wanted to alleviate the inefficiencies in education due to volunteer rotation and a lack of resources for our tutors. After launching the platform, students became more engaged and our tutors became more confident. We realized that what we had built could change the way students learn using technology. Joni.AI was conceived as a sustainable business in hopes of scaling our impact across social and geographical borders,” said Zonghan Goh, CTO, Joni.AI.

Teaching English using Amazon Alexa

Learning Matters teaches English through AI-enabled natural language voice recognition. The EdTech’s focus is on improving education in rural and semi-urban India. Learning Matters multi-pronged approach includes: a customized, year-long teacher training program called StarTeacher; a digital content platform Kengine; and a student-centric activity kits called ToolBox. To help quickly prototype new products and go to market, the team uses AWS documentation to understand how to develop new modules.

They also use Tara, an interactive AI-enabled natural language voice recognition tool powered by Amazon Alexa that teaches English and other subjects to teachers and students. Tara shows learners how to communicate through a combination of lessons that include listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Individual skills are created with and hosted by Alexa with back-end services, including the logic of all teacher and student interactions, hosted on AWS Lambda. Learning Matters built a community of tech and AI-enabled products to impact teacher quality, which resulted in personalized, measurable, and positive student learning outcomes.

“Having worked in the education-technology domain for two decades, our co-founders saw that the products and services in the industry only focused on supplementary education such as providing students with additional home-based support. However, there was a large population left underserved in India, which left so much unrealized potential and opportunity,” said Saras Ramamoorthy, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Learning Matters.

Transforming text into an interactive learning experience

StudySmarter is an intelligent AI-powered studying app for exam prep from Germany. The app is a content-agnostic learning platform with the goal to reduce university drop outs and help learners achieve their goals. With over 450,000 learners and 4,000 courses of study, StudySmarter built an intelligent toolbox, transforming text and documents into an interactive learning experience. This makes it easier and more efficient for students to learn course content. Using StudySmarter, 93% of users achieve better grades across all study programs and subjects.

StudySmarter provides students with learning plans adapted to student needs with weekly goals, mind maps, flashcards, and summaries all in one platform. The average user saves 113 minutes of revision time per lecture. To accommodate rapid user growth, StudySmarter uses AWS to develop new features and scale to meet student needs. StudySmarter uses services such as Amazon EC2 to accelerate their ML pipeline and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to send updates to students within seconds. This enables the team to provide every learner with an optimized learning experience with real-time analytics and individual recommendations, while also providing 99.99% uptime to keep student data secure.

“Thousands of students drop out of university due to a lack of motivation, structure, and efficiency. With StudySmarter, we are building the intelligent and content-agnostic platform for lifelong learning to counteract exactly this issue. The vision of StudySmarter is to empower everyone to achieve their educational goals,” said Maurice Khudhir, Co-founder, StudySmarter.

These AWS EdStart Members are using advances in AI and cloud computing to create new and more impactful AI-based solutions for virtual learning. Learn more about how our members around the world, like Kokomo 24/7 Safety Cloud and Bark, use AWS. Stay up to date on Education on AWS on the AWS Public Sector Blog.