This education startup is using AI to help students learn. It says tech should never replace human teachers

In 2021, Eugene Kashuk was looking for a new venture. The Ukrainian entrepreneur realized in the wake of the pandemic that there was a large gap in education. Students were lagging behind, particularly in math.

Kashuk started Brighterly, a platform that connects math teachers from all across the globe with students in the United States for private tutoring. Brighterly offers private lessons for $20 per 45-minute lesson—much cheaper than the average rate of about $40 per hour in the United States.

In part, Brighterly is able to keep costs down because it uses AI to generate lessons so teachers are able to use their time to focus on their student instead of coming up with problem sets and exams.

Fast Company chatted with Kashuk about Brighterly’s growth story and the role of AI in education.

How does Brighterly work?

We are a marketplace that connects teachers with students, but we’re not an ordinary marketplace where there’s no control over quality levels or standardization. We have a pretty sophisticated way of hiring and managing teachers and only accept 3% of applicants. We look for teaching skills and soft skills: 90% of our teachers have prior teaching experience.

We also have our own custom methodology and curriculum designed by a team of in-house experts, and then we use AI to generate content.

On the other side, we’ve got a platform that connects teachers, parents, and kids and allows for lessons to happen. Lessons themselves are fun, interactive, and gamified, and it all revolves around the school curriculum. It’s a high-impact education where we are able to gain academic results as fast as possible.

You mentioned using AI to create lessons. How do you make sure it’s not hallucinating or creating misinformation?

We are human driven in terms of the content that we create. There are some processes that you can automate using AI. For example, you need to explain fractions to a kid. The best way to do it is to find a circular object such as a pizza you split into pieces. You can use AI to generate images. You can use AI to generate ideas on what kind of circular object will work the best here and will be engaging and fun for the kids.

We don’t ask AI to tell us what to teach. As we see it, you can only use AI to create content that is aligned with what you teach.

What do you see as the role of AI in education?

When I think of AI technologies replacing human educators, I’m more afraid than excited. I’ll caveat and say the technology evolves so fast that you never know what it will look like in a few years.

At this point, I don’t see any potential that AI tutors might replace real human educators. In order for education to work, teachers need to form an emotional bond with their students. Not everything can be covered by logic and algorithms; you need to have that human input to understand what the child really needs.

We’re not at a moment where AI can really replace human interaction in education. However, we have great capabilities to generate content or to generate language to help create lessons and personalized assessments, which can be very useful for educators.

So you’re saying AI can lighten the load for teachers so they can focus on nourishing the emotional bond with students.

And so teachers can also focus on decision-making. You need a human teacher to understand how well a student is doing and assess what they need next. For example, maybe a student seems to grasp a topic but the teacher can sense that they’d benefit from some more repetition. I don’t see at this point how AI can pick up on moments like this.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The education gap isn’t just in math—there’s also a reading problem. We get daily requests for more reading lessons, so we’ll be launching a reading course as well. There was a COVID relief program that allocated resources to cover those gaps, but it’s unclear if it’ll be funded in the future.

In the meantime, the knowledge gap is growing. Currently, we only cover elementary and middle school, but we’ll also be launching a high school product to help with that gap. Children are the future and right now existing solutions for the knowledge gap aren’t working. We need more.

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