Frequently asked questions
Colleague distinguishes itself by having its own copyrighted algorithms that combine cutting-edge AI and proven teaching strategies to ensure high-quality educational materials. Human experts also review materials to reinforce their rigor, engagingness, and inclusivity. Colleague’s design enhances teacher productivity through tailored recommendations and thoughtful nudging. Offering Colleagues free to teachers, particularly allowing teachers from less resourced schools to access, which in turn increases our data representatives, best enables us to address algorithm bias due to limited training data and user bases. Lastly, Colleague offers teachers with comprehensive functionalities for lesson planning to save their time.
Colleague’s lesson content comes from Open Education Resources, materials compiled by our team with AI support, and teacher-created content. All sources are marked with their origin and under Creative Commons Licenses. To ensure quality, every material undergoes review by AI and human experts using lesson quality rubrics.
Colleague utilizes data from teachers’ activities on the platform and intake forms to dynamically suggest lesson plans tailored to students’ needs, including special education accommodation, academic progression, and language diversity, thereby ensuring effective and inclusive learning.
Colleague continuously improves its AI algorithm through incorporating the latest development of technologies and research evidence on effective instruction. Specifically, AI is used for better text classification, lesson plan generation, and nudging teachers’ creativity and continuous improvement. This enhances platform effectiveness, empowers teacher creativity, and saves planning time.
Unlike general AI tools like ChatGPT, Colleague uniquely offers vetted instructional materials under Creative Commons Licenses. Colleague’s integration of AI with research knowledge in effective teaching, and iterative refinement based on human experts’ inputs, ensure the quality and usefulness of the materials teachers create. Moreover, Colleague embeds thoughtfully-designed prompts and nudging algorithms dedicated for amplifying teachers’ creativity in lesson planning, rather than substituting for their agency.
Colleague assists teachers in creating high-quality lesson plans by thoroughly assessing them across three domains: Content Rigor, Activity Engagement, and Personalization. This evaluation encompasses more than 30 quality indicators related to the substance and instructional methods of a lesson. These indicators examine various aspects including alignment with state standards, cognitively challenging tasks, student cooperative learning, real-life applicability, deep questioning, and strategies for accommodating students’ personal learning requirements.
Colleague is a versatile platform beneficial to teachers in any district, whether or not they have a formal curriculum. It supports teachers using Open Educational Resources (OERs), such as Illustrative Math, by allowing the modification and creation of materials on a single platform. It also aids teachers using traditional curricula by enabling the translation of these materials into actionable lesson plans and supplementing them with current, engaging content. For teachers without any formally adopted curriculum, Colleague assists teachers in aligning resources with state standards and addresses various teaching challenges.
We manage algorithm bias through diversified human coders and continuous validation. We aim for transparency by documenting our decisions and data sources, ensuring accountability and alignment with federal policy in our tool development.