This September, Learnics has introduced a new feature utilizing innovative artificial intelligence natural language toolsets from Google to translate the content of the websites that students visit into one or more classification categories. We believe that, in utilizing these content categories, teachers can better understand the relevance of the websites that the students visit, and gain additional insights into their students' online behavior.
Natural language processing concerns the technologies behind the ability of computers to process and analyze human language. Much research and work has been done in the field of artificial intelligence and how it can be used to understand our own language. Companies like Google have been training artificial intelligence models and creating secure toolsets for developers to use in their own applications. The Natural Language API is one of these tools that allows us to use Google machine learning to discern meaning from our data. Using the Natural Language Content Classification API we can leverage Google's vast resources to process text of a website and generate classification categories.
Learnics takes the text from the websites that students visit and sends it to the Natural Language API. The API runs the text through their algorithms which determine the content categories that the text belongs to, and returns to us the list of categories. These categories are displayed on the teacher's analytics page at the classwide and individual student level, and at the individual level on the student's analytics page.
Teachers can use the classification categories to hold students accountable and evaluate time on task. Did the student get distracted while researching and visit websites unrelated to the assignment? How much of their time was spent on task?
Did the students understand the assignment? Did they visit the types of websites that you intended them to visit while researching? Could the teacher's assignment be improved to achieve the intended learning objectives?
Were the students able to pick out which websites were the most relevant and trustworthy for their research? Were they led astray by websites with content that appeared at first glance to be relevant but were not?
Learnics is constantly researching the latest tools so that we can utilize the most innovative technology to improve the process of learning and online research. We want teachers to be able to get the information that they need to solve these learning problems. If there are other metrics that you would like to see, please reach out to support@learnics.com.
