Improving Online Education

The Mission

The team at Prof Jim is using the technology behind Rapport to help fulfill their mission: to empower publishers, educators, and creators so they can transform their lessons into experiences.

In this case study, we explore how Prof Jim’s AI technology can help bring lessons to life in a fraction of the time, get better results across the board, and improve retention and engagement for individuals with dyslexia.

Redefining the Future of Learning

Prof Jim was born out of the pandemic when founders Dr. Deepak Sekar, Pranav Mehta, and Maria Walley saw their families struggle to engage with online learning. They witnessed a lack of user-friendly tools for teachers and set about to redefine the future of online teaching. 

The goal was to create a more engaging and authentic learning experience. To achieve this, Prof Jim partnered with Rapport to provide award-winning audio-driven facial animation for their characters, bringing lessons to life.

Bringing Lessons to Life in a Fraction of the Time 

Using Prof Jim’s patented AI solutions, teachers can transform ideas, books, and websites into beautiful slides or interactive videos, in a fraction of the time it would usually take them. In this study, a teacher created online lessons 15.5x faster using AI assistance.  

Educators can transport their audience anywhere to be taught by anyone with ease, they can take their lessons to Ancient Greece to learn with Aristotle or to Tudor England to learn with Henry VIII. 

It is in these characters that Rapport’s technology is used to synchronize realistic facial expressions with spoken content creating more engaging and authentic learning experiences.

Dr. Deepak Sekar, co-founder & CEO of Prof Jim, said:

“We're thrilled with the results we get using Rapport; it's been a game-changer for our animations. The realism it adds to our characters is remarkable, it allows us to convey emotions with precision and really brings our AI educators to life. There is evidence to show that video content with AI avatars can outperform traditional online methods of teaching and we believe that content like this can be a catalyst for more individualized learning and a transformation of the education sector.”

Better Results Across the Board

We all know that young people learn through video content. Prof Jim references a Pearson study that found that “GenZ strongly favors learning through YouTube and video.” The report showed that 59% of participants cited YouTube as their #1 preferred learning method over textbooks. The report also states that “GenZ has been so immersed in technology in every aspect of their lives that they no longer see it as a transformative phenomena, but rather as a normal, integral part of life.”

Prof Jim aims to help teachers meet these expectations, and has done research into the impact of AI Avatars. 

In their experiment, involving 700 students, they found that students who engaged with Prof Jim’s videos demonstrated a higher average percentage of correct answers than students who used textbooks alone. Students who watched the Prof Jim video did almost 37% better than the ones who did not, and this pattern was seen right across the US. 

Improving Retention and Engagement for Individuals with Dyslexia

According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity “Dyslexia affects 20 percent of the population and represents 80–90 percent of all those with learning disabilities. It is the most common of all neuro-cognitive disorders.”

Prof Jim has done some initial research that concluded that there is “compelling evidence that assistive learning technologies have a role to play in dyslexic learning performance and preference.” 

In this study they found that dyslexic participants accurately retained more information from one of their AI-dirven videos than from reading alone. Children who watched a Pro Jim-generated video displayed a 12% increase in learning and retention and 85% of participants felt it was easier to pay attention to the video than reading. Although this was just an initial study, it shows promising results and could be the foundation for education experiences that are more individualized, inclusive and effective.

Find out more

The Rapport platform makes it easy to combine AI, text-to-speech, facial animation and speech recognition, to create rich interactive experiences with emotionally intelligent characters, on any device.

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