Published on 10-25-2024
Daniels School faculty and students do more than teach and learn about artificial intelligence (AI), they use it in the classroom.
Clinical Professor of Strategic Management John Burr has teamed with alum Shrinivas Jandhyala (MSIA ’02) to create CorpusKey, a set of large language model (LLM) tools that employ AI to help instructors develop and tailor course material and measure student understanding.
Many instructors have articles, research papers and other materials they want to synthesize to make it easier for students to digest for instructional purposes. They can create a topic outline, then select the type of course options to develop, with class materials ranging from readings to slide decks to test banks to live cases. This allows a more personalized experience for their specific set of students while also allowing a wider range of courses.
The back-end processing relies on a set of intelligent LLM tools for specific tasks. These might include custom tokenizers for specific tasks in knowledge domain to sets of fine-tuned agents working in parallel to perform specific objectives. The LLM robots get to work based on the corpus of material to generate course materials for students and instructors, which instructors can then use as the core and further customize. It takes course development from months to days and changes the cost structure of textbook development.
In addition to the benefits of more personalized content, CorpusKey and AI in general can also give students more complete and timely feedback. Practitioners in AI and education are still exploring how to leverage these tools to benefit students and understand how instructor processes will change as a result.
CorpusKey has secured two rounds of seed funding and is now on the third version of its initial product, which has enabled it to expand its development efforts and hire additional students. There’s also been growing interest from a range of investors, including both professional funding sources and corporate stakeholders.
As instructors continue to develop ideas for new courses, CorpusKey will enable them to quickly generate core content, which they can then customize. These capabilities position the Daniels School to offer a more diverse and tailored curriculum that aligns with the varied backgrounds and career paths of today’s students. This will be vital as the school expands its offerings and recruits industry professionals and professors of practice to co-teach specialized topics.
