About the Client
The client is a leading Ed-Tech service provider that enables educators to provide a personalized and interactive learning experience to their students through their proprietary platform. Designed to enhance student engagement and improve educational outcomes, this Gen AI-driven courseware platform serves millions of students and educators across North America. Trusted by top colleges and universities, the platform drives meaningful engagement and fosters a collaborative and adaptive learning environment.
Country
Canada
Industry
Education
Services Used
Business Situation
In the field of education, research plays a crucial role in helping educators deliver quality content, improve decision-making, and support curriculum development. However, educational research is both cumbersome and time-consuming. Educators spend most of their time looking for information across various textbooks and physical course content. Navigating between multiple resources is another challenge for educators to conquer.
Our client decided to tackle these pain points by envisioning a learning management platform for educators that could enable faster access to accurate, relevant, and reliable teaching content and course material, which would eventually help students gain quality education and improve results.
To enable the same, the client’s team digitized as many as 100 textbooks in the form of PDFs to streamline the content process. However, digitizing these books was not enough.
The client wanted to further speed up the process of extraction of syllabus, course outline, and course material from these PDFs and enable educators to focus on refining the curriculum and enhancing their teaching practices – rather than sifting through 100s of pages of physical resources every time.
The client sought a reliable partner to build a GenAI-based pilot solution that could refine and elevate its course content generation process and address its critical needs.
Daffodil Software was chosen for its proven expertise in developing robust cloud-native applications with GenAI and AI/ML capabilities.
The key requirements were to:
Streamline the course-content extraction process by developing a text parser that fetches key information such as course name, subject, objectives, etc. for effective course planning, resource allocation, and curriculum development.
Recommend textbooks, generate course outlines, and create content based on syllabus inputs, by leveraging the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique.
Improve search speed and accuracy of content retrieved.
Evaluate performance using GCP-recommended metrics.
The Solution
Team Daffodil engaged with the client and gathered all relevant project knowledge from the client’s team. A dedicated team of AI/ML engineers and cloud experts came together to take the client’s vision to reality with a market-fit solution.
Keeping in mind the growing user base and to ensure the scalability of the platform in the long run, Team Daffodil proposed a cloud-native development approach to the client. This would ensure that the system performed well even under peak load, critical data and services remained accessible at all times, and the platform was fully secure.
Our team utilized Google Cloud services to host both the backend (FastAPI) and the front end (HTML and JavaScript). The goal was to ensure seamless integration between the frontend hosted on Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and the FastAPI backend deployed on Cloud Run. Manual deployments were utilized, with version control and code management handled through GitHub.
By adopting the cloud architecture, our team helped the client reduce the manual effort required to handle the vast amount of educational content. What was once a labor-intensive and error-prone task (Such as: searching for syllabus details, recommending books, creating course outlines, and gathering additional materials) became automated and efficient.
This efficiency boost allowed our client to focus more on high-value tasks, such as developing quality course content and engaging with students.
Key outcomes of the solution:
Team Daffodil developed a smart & sophisticated text parser that automated the entire process of syllabus extraction. The system would pull data from the pre-uploaded syllabus files in a matter of seconds, which would earlier take hours to do so.
The parser scanned the syllabus files and showcased the required details such as course name, subject, objectives, etc.
Another advantage of the solution was that traditional keyword-based search methods often missed out on semantically similar content, however, our developed solution ensured that content with similar meaning could also be found, even if the keywords were not the same. Let’s say an educator searches for “Web Development”, the solution would also showcase syllabi containing words like “Site Building” or “Website Creation”.
This would ensure that no related topic is missed and help educators to build more reliable teaching material.
Our client had a huge collection of course material, stored in various formats (such as PDF, DOCX, etc.) and locations (such as local drives, emails, etc.). Extracting the right information from those files was a challenge for the client.
Our developed solution automatically organized and loaded course material to cloud storage where it could be easily accessed and used by AI tools. This helped the AI understand and interact with the course materials in real time, making the whole process faster and more accurate.
The system also kept the files organized, even if they were in several layers of folders, making it easier to find specific content.
To implement a powerful search and recommendation system, our team utilized advanced prompt engineering techniques for Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG).
When a user makes a query, the system searches its internal database as well as external sources such as online knowledge bases and databases, to retrieve the most relevant and up-to-date information. Next, it generates a personalized, context-aware answer for the same utilizing the retrieved and available information.
This approach was adopted to enhance course content discovery and relevance, which was a significant concern for our client, as they needed to ensure that their educational resources were high-quality, up-to-date, and context-aware.
How this helped:
Rank-wise Textbook Recommendations: To ensure that educators have the most popular book suggestions handy, our team utilized Vertex AI Search to suggest the top 3 textbooks that align with the syllabus.
Automated Course Outline Generation: The solution generated course outlines from syllabus data helping educators with a quick peek into what the course is all about.
Content Generation: The solution’s capability to extract similar content from the available files enriched the search experience for educators. It offered them with comprehensive content on similar topics. This way they won’t have to scrounge through multiple books and spend a lot of time in curriculum development.
This RAG-based approach not only improved the quality of the generated content but also enhanced the overall user experience for educators.
Additionally, Team Daffodil evaluated the performance of the RAG approach using the recommended methodologies of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and tracked key metrics and performance indicators.
Our team worked closely with the client to define UAT criteria & test the solution. This collaborative approach helped to improve the solution’s performance and ensured the system’s reliability. We also conducted comprehensive training sessions covering system functionalities, best practices, and troubleshooting techniques.
The Impact
Team Daffodil’s efforts have positioned the client as a leader in the EdTech space. The platform has empowered over 3 million students and 24k educators to date. Trusted by 750+ leading colleges and universities in North America, it has raised over $225 million in funding towards accelerating innovation and enhancing research abilities and learning experiences for both educators and students.
The client’s partners have reported significantly higher student engagement in the classroom and elevated student evaluation scores through the use of the platform.
With a robust infrastructure, the client is better equipped than ever to meet the evolving needs of the education sector, driving impactful, personalized learning experiences and shaping the future of education.
3M+
Students
24k
Educators
$225M
Funding Raised
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