AI Use Cases in Education: How Top Virtual Academies Are Using AI to Save Time & Resources

Many companies and learning organizations are eager to utilize AI but they struggle with understanding how to use it effectively. Oftentimes, they invest in strategies and products that fail to deliver the expected results.

To address this, we have interviewed AI-savvy organizations like Pragmatic Institute and AI Academy, which have been successfully using AI long before the advent of ChatGPT. These organizations have highlighted the significant benefits of AI-driven adaptive learning platforms in creating personalized and inclusive learning experiences for students.

Based on their insights, we have compiled a list of key AI use cases that other organizations can experiment with.

Special thanks to these learning organizations:

• Pragmatic Institute - provides world-class training in product management, product marketing, and data science, empowering professionals with skills to drive businesses forward.
• AI Academy - revolutionizes education by offering comprehensive, industry-focused Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning courses.
• GTM AI Academy - offers comprehensive training and resources to help professionals leverage AI for effective go-to-market strategies.

What we will learn together:

• From our interviews, we’ve determined that educational institutions can greatly benefit from the integration of AI technology to enhance their educational programs. The utilization of AI can be divided into two sectors: Products and Operations.‍
• Learning organizations can leverage AI by training it with their knowledge base and student data. This data can then be used as a chatbot or an assistant, a strategy already in play at both the Pragmatic Institute and AI Academy. AI can provide real-time feedback to students, offering immediate guidance and corrections, which enhances personalized learning experiences.
• While AI can augment our work, it is not a replacement for human input. With numerous AI tools available, organizations should carefully select those that solve real problems and make a significant impact on their workflow and learners, recognizing that learning experiences cannot be standardized.
• Lastly, AI is a tool used by humans to improve our work. Therefore, instead of questioning what AI can do for us, we should be asking what AI should be doing for us, effectively reframing our approach to AI integration.

AI x Learning Products

Training AI models for your organization’s benefits

Training AI models is vital for learning organizations as it significantly enhances their decision-making process. It optimizes resource allocation by handling mundane tasks, freeing up time for more challenging issues.

Additionally, these models can also identify patterns and trends in student performance data, providing a competitive edge. Both Pragmatic Institute and AI Academy have their own trained AI, both built in-house with an internal AI and data science team.

As an example, Pragmatic Institute developed an AI tool called AI Compass using their internal models. The project was led by their in-house data scientists and experienced instructors with over 25 years of expertise, who served as subject matter experts in the project. 

Creating this AI model involved years of training based on Pragmatic principles and a proprietary framework, seamlessly integrating AI into their internal workflow and learning community.

Today, AI Compass is a gated tool and can be used primarily by Pragmatic’s alumni community. When a person joins and finishes their courses, they can use AI Compass automatically as a chatbot to answer their queries which are based on Pragmatic’s product methodologies:

AI Compass stands out from tools like Claude and ChatGPT by referencing source material in its answers. This feature enables students to delve deeper into the content from which answers were sourced, enhancing the learning experience beyond simply interacting with a bot. As a result, learning with AI Compass is more enriching than with typical AI bots.

How can you apply this to your learning organization?

Pragmatic Institute’s development of its AI tool, AI Compass, is exemplary and beneficial for its educational mission. However, not every organization has the resources to assemble an expert team of data scientists and instructors for such an innovative project.

Recognizing this, Disco has created an AI-powered social learning platform that enables any learning institution to train our built-in AI native tool--Disco AI, using their own knowledge base and community data. We've made our tool universally beneficial, not just for us but for learning communities.

Even those without a tech or engineering team can leverage our tool, training the AI at any stage of development. If your organization sees value in this, here's how to start training Disco AI with your knowledge base:

Step #1: Navigate to the Admin Area in the Disco dashboard. Click ‘settings’ and ‘training sources’. Make sure you have a Disco account to navigate the platform.

Step #2: Once there, click on '+Training sources'. Paste the URL of your content and choose whether to scrape the entire domain or a specific subpath.

Step #3: Allow the system a few hours to process. Upon completion, you'll see the URLs Disco AI has scraped and the content type used for training. Make desired edits and repeat the process as needed.

With these easy steps, every virtual academy will have a chance to accelerate its performance when it comes to managing its learners.

AI as a Creator of Personalized Learning Experiences

AI models facilitate personalized learning experiences that stimulate critical thinking based on users’ preferences and learning history. With 40,000 eager members, Pragmatic Institute relies on AI to personalize learning experiences, which would be impossible without this technology.

Their AI model provides personalized recommendations for resources, tools, and action items based on each individual's unique use case, ensuring that every member receives targeted support without overburdening the internal team.

How to apply?

Implementing AI tools to recommend content based on skill level, knowledge, and learning style can be challenging. However, you can begin by grouping learners into small groups, organizing group sessions, and facilitating peer learning activities. The Disco platform can assist in making this process easier and more effective.

AI x Learning Operations

Pragmatic Institute integrates AI into their workflows to improve operational efficiency, enhance resource recommendations, and support their community's needs. 

AI is also used to automate and streamline various administrative tasks, such as managing school operations and processing student applications. These are the areas in which they have adopted AI into their workflow and here’s how you can execute it too:

Generating content to create new original content

Pragmatic Institute's first use case for adopting AI involves generating new content and enhancing existing educational materials, such as historical documents and images.

In this scenario, AI acts as a virtual learning assistant, helping educators create various types of learning content, including texts, videos, images, and quizzes.

The most notable advantage of integrating AI is the dramatic increase in the speed of content creation. Additionally, AI helps overcome writer’s block by suggesting preliminary drafts or ideas, which educators can then refine.

AI serves two primary functions: exploration and iteration

For exploration, AI excels at analyzing vast datasets or complex subjects, quickly identifying patterns and insights that would take humans significantly longer to uncover. For example, AI can sift through extensive research articles, historical records, or large datasets to extract relevant information and present it in a comprehensible format.

This capability allows Pragmatic Institute's alumni and instructors to delve deeper into topics, facilitating a more thorough understanding and discovery of new knowledge.

This rapid prototyping capability has been beneficial for Pragmatic Institute's internal team in creating and designing tasks, enabling quick experimentation with different approaches. By producing several designs or iterations in a short time, AI helps the team to refine their work more efficiently, leading to higher-quality outcomes.

Pattern recognition to analyze student data in large data sets

Pattern recognition in large data sets is crucial for developing data-driven insights and strategic decision-making processes. AI can monitor student progress, providing data-driven insights that help in making better decisions. This has been one of the areas that Pragmatic has seen in their AI journey.

Various techniques are used for this, including data preprocessing, clustering, classification, anomaly detection, association rule learning, regression analysis, dimensionality reduction, and neural networks and deep learning.

These techniques help remove noise, fill missing values, group similar data points, identify categories, detect outliers, find relationships between variables, model relationships between variables, reduce redundancy, and detect complex patterns.

By using these techniques, learning organizations can extract valuable insights to analyze student data, leading to better decision-making, increased efficiency, and improved customer experiences.

How to Maintain Human Connections While Using a Virtual Learning Assistant

In a world where everyone is telling you to use AI, it’s difficult to maintain human connections and human touch with your work while using this powerful technology. So the biggest question is ‘How to create human connection while using Artificial Intelligence?’

In short, how can you ensure you are building authentic relationships among your learners, instructors, and other stakeholders while using an AI tool that scales your operations?

Pragmatic Institute advocates for a balance between AI and humans. As they hold 40,000 members in their community, they ensure that relevancy and segmentation are still at the forefront of how they manage a massive number of people at scale.

Imagine 40,000 people across different segments and verticals. How are you going to lead them to learn, connect, and interact with each other? The solution—group them into mini-communities based on their backgrounds and interests to ensure that the conversation and connections are still relevant, impactful, and natural.

AI chatbots using natural language processing (NLP) can provide personalized support and maintain human connections by understanding and responding to individual needs, making interactions feel more personal and engaging.

How can you apply this to your learning organization?

If you have a large organization with thousands of members, a learning platform that allows you to group members into smaller communities can be a game-changer.

According to the Pragmatic Institute, the relevance and authenticity of human connection diminish in larger groups. Creating smaller, interactive groups can maintain relevance and increase engagement in your learning organizations.

With Disco's learning platform, you can easily create groups and subgroups, depending on the interests of your members. You can even automate this during the onboarding of your new members so you don’t need to add them to the group manually.

Step #1: Navigate the Admin Area with your Disco account. Go to ‘members’ and then ‘groups’. Add a custom group, fill in the information, and add your existing members to the group. Repeat the process if you want to create several custom groups.

Step #2: Then in the automation section, you can easily create a conditional branch where a new onboarded member can be added to the group when he/she mentions ‘HR’ in the user profile, for example.

After setting this up, you may create events specifically for this group to give them space to connect and create human connections while using automation and AI.

📺 Watch this short tutorial to learn more:

The Best Use Case We’ve Ever Heard: Using AI to Make an Impact on Learners

At the end of the day, AI is a tool. It’s not the protagonist of the story—humans are. AI should be used to make an impact on the education sector by improving how humans learn and work.

We had a chance to interview Georgina Donahue, the Director of Community at Pragmatic Institute. Georgina ensures that the vast community of alumni in Pragmatic Institute has fresh, robust, and intuitive resources to support learners in implementing the lessons they learned in the classroom. Her mission is to turn training into action and knowledge into daily habits & skills.

She left us with a great question that made us think and changed our perspective on how to use AI in this modern era:

‘The question we should be asking ourselves is not what AI can do for us, but what AI should be doing for us?’ - Georgina Donahue, Director of Community at Pragmatic Institute

AI is a powerful technology, but that doesn’t mean all the use cases we’ve tackled here are useful for every learning organization. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to using AI in education, and it still matters to the needs of every institution.

For instance, AI can significantly enhance language learning experiences by providing personalized learning paths and instant feedback, making it a valuable tool for educational platforms. Additionally, AI can offer real-time feedback to students, providing immediate guidance and corrections, which enhances personalized learning experiences.

We have laid down the use cases based on our expert interviews in this article, and it is now your call whether these use cases, when implemented in your virtual academies, can make an impact on your internal team and your learners.

If you want to explore how Disco AI can help your learning organizations, book a personalized demo with our expert team so we can show you live how our built-in AI tool can work for your learners and operators.

Meanwhile, if you feel like you want to try it yourself, you can create a free Disco account for 14 days to start executing the use cases that were shared by Pragmatic Institute and AI Academy. Go ahead and best of luck!

👉🏻 Up Next: Learn how AI will fuel the growth of transformative community learning. Own words from our co-founder, Candice Faktor.