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Local professor creates AI platform for teachers

Mark Parker

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Zafer Unal, an education professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, created a free platform with nearly 700 generative artificial intelligence tools to assist teachers. Photo provided.

A University of South Florida St. Petersburg professor expected educators to “hate” artificial intelligence (AI). He found most were already using the nascent technology outside of the classroom, despite costs and privacy concerns.

Education professor Zafer Unal sought to eliminate those barriers. He created TeacherServer to provide free and secure AI tools that assist with planning, assessment, preparation and research.

Over 61,00 K-12 teachers and college faculty members now use the platform’s roughly 700 AI-enabled solutions covering myriad needs and subjects. The university announced TeacherServer’s launch – and early success – Monday.

“Creating the tool is easy,” Unal told the Catalyst. “But you need to make it meaningful.”

Development began with Unal and his research team discerning if and how educators in Florida and Georgia incorporated AI into the learning process. They expected negative responses due to job loss and student cheating fears.

A subsequent survey found that most used commercially available platforms outside the classroom to help with grading and presentations. However, data privacy was a top concern.

Unal said holistic solutions are also cost-prohibitive. Teachers must subscribe to different platforms to generate images or animations for specific subjects and needs.

The third challenge was a lack of training and aligning AI-generated results with state education standards. “You have to be a great prompter to get the perfect outcome you seek,” Unal said.

“So, we said, ‘Can we do this ourselves?’” he explained. “Can we create a model, install it on our local server, tell the model not to use user data and make sure it is encrypted – all the things teachers are looking for.”

Feedback is critical to TeacherServer’s success. The initial version offered 47 tools, primarily for K-12 teachers.

Unal, who also has a computer science background, said about 65% of the platform’s users hail from Florida. “It’s mostly local because it started local, but it’s spreading right now.”

Unal asked teachers to continue providing suggestions for solutions that make them more effective educators. The platform’s number of AI-enabled tools has soared to nearly 700 in months, and he has roughly 300 additional requests in a queue.

Colleagues requested an expansion to accommodate college faculty. TeacherServer now includes a section dedicated to research.

The TeacherServer interface. Screengrab.

Unal said users receive access to server settings and can verify it does not store sensitive student data typically used to train AI models. While mitigating an associated learning curve was a priority, he and his team have designed professional development workshops and embedded instructional videos into the platform.

Unal said the platform could help inform teachers before a lecture. It can also provide research topics, questions and surveys and perform data analysis simulations.

“That means, if you just started, you don’t need to ask 20 people or go onto Google and spend hours and hours looking at which data analysis or collection method is best for your research,” Unal added. “You can actually do the work rather than spending the time to get more information about it.”

USF St. Petersburg’s College of Education hosted TeacherServer workshops with educators and administrators from school districts throughout the region over the summer. Stakeholders have requested additional tools for students.

Unal is now applying for less restrictive national grants to acquire another server. That will enable expansion to accommodate students and teachers nationwide.

Unal realizes that AI, with a roughly 80% success rate, is not perfect. He called it a tool, like a calculator. He also noted that people were once afraid of the internet eliminating jobs.

“Nothing will be able to replace teachers in the classroom,” Unal said. “That’s why we didn’t start building the tools for students. Teachers are the subject matter experts.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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