Innovation In Digital Education: Dinis Guarda Interviews Dr. Chris Trace, Chief Academic Officer at KEATH.ai

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Dr. Chris Trace, Chief Academic Officer at KEATH.ai, shares insights on how KEATH.ai is evolving education with AI, the impact of digital learning tools, opportunities for startups to revolutionise the education sector and challenges and opportunities presented by AI in education. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Dr. Chris Trace is the Chief Academic Officer at KEATH.ai, an AI EdTech start-up that originated from the University of Surrey. He has also represented KEATH.ai at significant platforms, including UNESCO in Paris and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) in London. Prior to this, Dr. Chris was the Head of Digital Learning at the University of Surrey, where he led digital innovation and supported academic staff in using contemporary technological tools.

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Dr. Chris Trace discusses the journey of scaling KEATH.ai globally:

"The company itself was launched in the House of Lords, which is not a bad starting point for a company in terms of getting some recognition. We were also fortunate to be selected as participants within the Microsoft Founders Hub for startups, so that was a great launch pad. Essentially, we got a lot of support from Microsoft.

We got a lot of interest from the University of Surrey to help us launch. There’s been essentially a series of learning opportunities, partnering with a lot of institutions to tweak, refine, and create products and features within that product that really enable them to do what they need to do.

That has led to some investment, which has let us scale up and up and up. And so we’re at a point now where, yes, we’re launching our second version of our web app. We’ve just recently launched a new product called Lumen as well, which hopefully you've seen some of on YouTube.”

KEATH.ai: Innovation in digital education

Dr. Chris Trace explains the origins, purpose, and vision behind the company. KEATH AIi:

"Keath is a startup; it's a spin-out from the University of Surrey with the ambition to empower educators. That's fundamentally what we're trying to do in order to unleash the potential of the education system for students.

The tool is trying to help that marker when they've got a stack of papers. It's an AI assessment assistant.

We create a bespoke model for every single assignment that comes our way. The core AI can't do all the things that ChatGPT can do, but what it can do is assess your work.

Consistency is really key; it needs to be meaningful, it needs to be accurate. KEATH can help you with that; it can suggest marks for each of your criteria and sections.

The educator doesn’t just sign that off and not be involved. They are presented with that as a starting point and can still read through the work, change all of it, change the marks, change the feedback.

It really enhances the amount of feedback and the quality of the feedback they’re able to provide. The educator wins because they're less stressed, they've saved some time.

Everybody wins, the student wins because they're getting better feedback, more consistent marks, fairer marks, and the educator wins because they save time and can contribute that time towards more valuable activities."

Opportunities for startups in education

Dr. Chris discusses the impact of AI on education, particularly in terms of how AI is changing the landscape of learning:

“AI has been around for a while, but it just wasn't in the public consciousness. A lot of people still look back to the launch of ChatGPT as people really waking up and thinking, 'Wow, okay GPT.'

LLMs and what they can do have really made people think about how education could be different. The COVID pandemic nudged people towards more digitally enabled forms of education.

A lot of education went online very rapidly, often in a hurry and not as well as it could have been. Vast amounts of lessons learned, however, some areas reverted back to how they had done it before.

The wave of AI coming after that has been really a second warning bell that actually there are fundamental things in terms of education that need to be different. Education at any level always has opportunities for making it better and better.

Education can be more personalised, it can be done more efficiently, it can be more fun than it necessarily has been. There are loads of opportunities to make things easier for the educators and the managers in the process.

We are mainly targeting universities right now, partly because of the scale and breadth, and the background that we have in that area. Lifelong learning opportunities, there's a load of education providers and systems out there where we can harness the power of technology, AI, and subject matter experts.

Never cut humans out of the loop, they should be firmly in the loop.

Opportunities abound for us and other educators in this space to continually enhance how education is delivered, regardless of your age."

AI, education, and reskilling challenges

Dr. Chris Trace explores the various challenges and opportunities presented by AI in education:

"There are challenges with any tool; it's a double-edged sword, there will be challenges, there will be opportunities.

Whenever there are changes in the way that we as a species operate, there are going to be challenges, and there are going to be opportunities.

I'm a big fan of metaphors as an educational hook to get people to think about and translate messages from one brain to the other.

The deployment of the loom that put lots of people out of work... mass moving of employment from one area to another, things changed, and it was okay, and new jobs were created as a result.

When the electronic calculator came along, people tried to ban it. But then they realised, actually, how about we give students electronic calculators and make the questions much harder.

In the real world, they would have a calculator. We need to change our expectations and make assessments harder.

Universities that are trying to ignore this and pretend it hasn’t happened are doing their students a disservice; they will be left behind if they are not using these tools.

You won't necessarily lose your job to AI, but you may well lose your job to somebody who’s using AI, be that person who's using these tools.

Whatever you’ve seen with AI right now, this is the least capable it will ever be. It’s only going to get better; don’t base a policy on what it can’t do now.

We need to be preparing people for the future of work, where it's uncertain but it's likely that they'll need to retain their critical thinking, and integrate technologies like this into what they do."