The future of learning is AI: How ProfBot is transforming education

Amanda Cupido: This is The Forefront, a Toronto Metropolitan University podcast that explores ideas for cities. I’m Amanda Cupido.

So here’s the problem: we haven’t fully figured out how to embrace the newest surge of artificial intelligence, and AI is everywhere. It’s in our phones, our homes, and even our classrooms.

When looking at it from an education perspective, it raises important questions. Will AI remove the human side of teaching? Will it create new divides in learning? Can it be harnessed to support students, and not just give them shortcuts? In higher education, the debate over AI is heated. I know this firsthand because I’ve taught classes at Toronto Metropolitan University and other local colleges.

Some argue that it could make it all too easy for students to cheat or plagiarize, while others see it as a tool for enhancing the educational experience. I do see both sides of the argument. But personally, I’ve decided to lean into the fact that this technology is here to stay. Plus, it’s not just about tools like ChatGPT. AI can actually help students in other ways than just writing their papers for them.

Margaret Koca: I think in the final I scored a 98. In this course, I scored a 96. I even finished the exam fairly quickly, like maybe it took me an hour and a half, as opposed to like two hours and a half or three. So yeah, I think it helped me.

Amanda Cupido: That’s Margaret Koca. She’s talking about a new AI study tool that she was one of the first students to use. She tested it out while studying for her final exam in the Law and Business program at TMU.

Margaret Koca: So it was like maybe two weeks before our final exam. Sean had given us an update that he was going to give us a surprise tool, like in January, and it was like reaching almost exam season. So he was like, “Okay, you guys are going to be allowed to use AI to study for the exam.” He’s like, “It’s gonna help you do really well on the exam.” And so it kind of looked like a gift from heaven, you know. Like, oh, okay. So if I do this, I’m gonna ace the exam. Easy, right? Everyone was pretty excited to use it. I mean, I was very excited to use it.

Amanda Cupido: The tool is called ProfBot. It was introduced to Margaret’s class in 2022, which was right around the same time ChatGPT was released. So at the time, many educators were resistant to the idea of AI in the classroom because there were a lot of unknowns.

Margaret Koca: It was like, never heard of for a professor to come to you and be like, “Yeah, I know AI is happening right now. No, I’m not going to ban you from using it. Instead, I’m going to give you this tool.” So I think that’s when everyone was shocked.

Amanda Cupido: ProfBot is still in its beta phase, but is designed to be straightforward. Students can open it up in a browser and simply answer a few questions it prompts them with. These questions are carefully curated by their professor with an upcoming exam in mind.

Margaret Koca: But the beauty behind it is it’ll give you suggestions of where to focus on. Let’s say it was a concept, and you just wrote down the definition. Then the bot will be like, okay, yeah, correct definition, it matches, but like, what else? So it won’t tell you how to fix it. You just kind of have to use your critical thinking and re-answer and re-answer, and it helps you learn the material better.

Amanda Cupido: In every classroom, you’ll find a wide range of learning styles. Every student grasps material a little differently. Margaret says that unlike other online tools, ProfBot feels like a more personalized study experience. That’s because the AI curates its responses as it gets to know you. She says that’s really paid off for her and her peers.

Margaret Koca: The overall grades went up by 5%. Like, that’s huge because you’re not just taking your A students that are going up by 5%, you’re taking your C students, or even people who are failing the class. And now they’ve learned the material to the point where they actually do have an understanding.

Dr. Sean Wise: One of the unmet market needs I had was in my own classroom. Students seemed more interested in their phones than in my fabulous entrepreneurial stories, and that was a real change.

Amanda Cupido: That’s Dr. Sean Wise. He’s a professor of Entrepreneurship at TMU’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

Dr. Sean Wise: But I believe you’ve got to find the customer where they are, and if students are on their phone, then we’ve got to figure out a way to make the phone part of the class.

Amanda Cupido: He was Margaret’s professor back in 2022 and the founder of ProfBot AI. He says the goal was to use AI as a teaching assistant that could be available 24/7 and be discreet about student progress.

Dr. Sean Wise: Students would not use a teaching assistant if it reported back to the professor. and so, human TAs sort of already figured that out. And the AI needed to figure that out. So we knew that anything the students used would have to be blinded to the professor. So it wouldn’t be useful to mark things. It wouldn’t be useful to replace that. It would be useful to let the students talk and to engage. And since Socrates, we’ve known that the best way to learn is to discuss.

Amanda Cupido: Dr. Wise would reference Socrates. Okay, I had to. The last name is just too perfect. Anyway, in the early days of development, he had ethics and privacy concerns top of mind.

Dr. Sean Wise: I spoke to our legal person and I just talked about what we could do to make it not an issue. We don’t want to expose students’ information. We don’t want to misinformation the students. We don’t want to give negative feedback. We don’t want to do all these things.

Amanda Cupido: Most of the AIs will just do whatever you tell them to do. So he knew he also had to set strict parameters to prevent misuse from the student side.

Dr. Sean Wise: So I could tell the AI, call me Prof. Wise, or call me Dr. Wise or call me Sean. But I could also tell the AI to call me some racist slang. And the AI, having no feelings or no thoughts of its own, would just start calling me Prof. Dimwit. We expect our students to push and pull and try everything. That’s how we make it better. And so right away we stripped it of all of those capabilities.

Amanda Cupido: Another important feature was making sure the AI was able to understand the students, no matter how their answers were worded.

Dr. Sean Wise: This latest technology was able to parse or understand different synonyms that if a student says it’s huge, it’s the same as saying it’s large. It’s the same as saying it’s enormous. So if I ask the student, what kind of return would you want before risking it all? And they say “huge,” but I wanted “extreme,” they’re both the same meaning. And so the real change that occurred was the ability of the machine to understand the students’ answers.

Amanda Cupido: Dr. Wise says one of the things it did best was give positive feedback and point out the best parts of virtually any answer.

Dr. Sean Wise: Even if the students got nowhere near the answer, it was still like, “Good try!” and, “Here’s where I think you should focus on.” And so students could test their level of knowledge before studying, so they could sort of figure out where they’re weakest on. But what it really aspired, and what really worked well was, at the end of the quiz, it gave you how to correct your mistakes. It talked to them like a human being might and gave them encouragement, way more than we do, way more than any human could. Because some of these questions weren’t answered that well. But the machine doesn’t care.

Amanda Cupido: He says the three main takeaways from that first pilot in Margaret’s class were, one: the more students used it before the exam, the more it helped boost their grade. Two: that students really enjoyed using it, and three: that students are students.

Dr. Sean Wise: 75% of the chatbot activity was in the last 24 hours, so everyone waited until the last minute and then decided to talk to the robot. That was just horrifying to me as a professor, because I gave it to them ten days. They could have started ten days ago, but no, the majority of them did that.

Amanda Cupido: Since then, Dr. Wise has worked with students like Margaret to improve ProfBot.

Margaret Koca: At the time, I was writing the LSAT, and me and him were talking a lot about critical thinking. So he decided to add a critical thinking quiz for students, as a participation grade.

Dr. Sean Wise: Watching Margaret watch the students interact was quite a thing. And to see what she got as feedback and from the students using it, because she was the first to use it, was quite a thing. And in our second pilot, that’s what we really took away, that it isn’t the professor, it’s the tool.

Amanda Cupido: If it’s the tool, not the professor, then that means ProfBot has the potential to help students in classrooms everywhere. That’s the beauty of AI, the scalability! And it is currently being tested in other universities. The only barrier it’s currently facing is a lack of AI policies at some institutions, although Dr. Wise says it’s only a matter of time.

Dr. Sean Wise: I mean, the last time I saw someone say, “Print your essay and put it in my mailbox.” Like, people don’t do that anymore. And so I think in the next five years, some schools will embrace it. Some schools will say, “Why don’t I change and figure out how I can be the best education institute on AI?” So I think tools like ProfBot will continue to proliferate. I mean, we know this. We saw that with the telephone. We saw that with Google. But ChatGPT went to 100 million users in a world-record time. And so I think that shows that the community at large, the younger community at large, wants it.

Amanda Cupido: Not only would adopting AI in the classroom give the younger community what they want, it would also help educators do a better job at helping their students be as successful as possible.

Dr. Sean Wise: We’re not using abacuses anymore. We’re not using chalk and chalkboards anymore. And the reason is simple, because it’s ten times better the new way. And so as an educator, your job is to educate your students to facilitate their learning, and you’re obligated to use every tool in your power. There are a thousand off the top uses for AI in the classroom that I could just think of just sitting here. So the question isn’t will you? It’s a question of how will you?

Amanda Cupido: And from a student’s perspective, Margaret says that she would have loved the chance to use ProfBot in other classes. She maintains that it not only helps boost grades, but also helps students understand the material, rather than just memorizing it. She was even able to tell us about one of the answers on the exam she wrote back in 2022. Naturally, she continues to be a fan of it to this day.

Margaret Koca: I think it would have helped a lot in my law classes, because law classes are all about critical thinking, right? And virtually no one’s answers are going to be identical. So I think having ProfBot would just like improve your answers, improve the defense, the critical thinking that goes into it. Oftentimes, we’re not challenged to think critically in our education. We’re kind of more focused around like, how do we get a good grade, you know, does the prof agree with what we’re saying. And so a tool like this kind of forces you into that habit.

Amanda Cupido: Before we go, here’s Dr. Sean Wise one more time on why he’s grateful for TMU.

Dr. Sean Wise: Not only do I get to run my own experiments, but I get to own my own intellectual property. I get to build solutions. And I have been very appreciative of the university and my faculty and my department, always encouraging that. TMU is very special in that it has amazing professors who are mostly experiential based. I’ve been an entrepreneur well before I was ever a professor of it. And once you have them, you’ve got to be smart enough to let them do their thing. And our school seems to recruit people and then let them be the best at what they are.

Amanda Cupido: This podcast was created for alumni and friends by University Advancement at Toronto Metropolitan University. Special thanks to our guests on today’s episode: Margaret Koca and Dr. Sean Wise. This podcast was produced by me, Amanda Cupido, and Jasmine Rach, who also edited the show. We are both proud grads of TMU. The team from the university side includes Haweya Fadal, Meredith Jordan and Rivi Frankle. To help fuel the research and learning coming from Ted Rogers School of Management at TMU, consider donating to Toronto Metropolitan University. Join us in shaping a brighter future together. Visit torontomu.ca/alumni.