Discovery Ed Speeds Teaching Recommendations with Addition of AWS ML

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 09/30/21

Discovery Education has added machine learning to its learning platform, to personalize recommendations to the teachers who use the platform as they're putting together lessons. The personalization technology, which is produced by Amazon Web Services, will be used to customize the choices shown in a "Just for You" area on each educator's homepage within the program. The goal is to speed up the process of finding just the right digital resources, based on a number of factors, including designated preferences, previous selections and grade level.

The company continuously adds new content and resources to the platform, including standards-aligned content, digital lessons, quiz and activity creation tools and professional learning resources, in response to current events and the evolving needs of educators. Those are curated and contextualized by a team of human experts. The addition of ML, according to Chief Product Officer Pete Weir will "improve educators' productivity by providing the digital content they want and need even faster than before."

"Continuous improvement is a core value at Discovery Education, and as such, we are constantly seeking innovative new ways to improve our resources and save educators time," Weir said in a press release. "We are incredibly proud to be collaborating with AWS and pioneering how education technology can personalize teaching and learning. The success of this collaboration to date encourages my team to look for even more places within our services to integrate machine learning technology and improve our services' ability to adapt to our users."

"For some time, educators have desired more resources to help personalize teaching and learning. ML technology is already being used to curate our entertainment experiences, help with workforce productivity and more, and it's exciting to see this innovation is being integrated into classrooms," added Alec Chalmers, director of the education technology market at AWS. "Amazon Personalize creates high quality recommendations that better respond to the specific needs and preferences of today's learners, which ultimately improves engagement in teaching and learning."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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