Knewton, the $100m robo tutor that reads your mind

Children as young as 3 have used it, as have postgraduate students. At Arizona State University the system was credited with helping to halve the drop-out rate and boosting the pass rate from 64% to 75%. At Northeastern Illinois University, students using the system saw their exam grades climb by 12.5 percentage points.

Last week, Ferreira made his ground-breaking system available free to everyone in the world, on the internet.

That is not just an act of altruism. Every additional teacher or student who uses the system makes Knewton more intelligent and thus better able to read the minds of the next students who come along. Robo-tutor is only getting started — and no one quite knows yet what it is capable of.

“Would we love for so many people to come on to the system that we break it? On some levels, yes,” said Ferreira. “All we can do is engineer a system so that it can grow as rapidly as possible.

“The goal is for it to be a universal, immensely powerful global learning platform. We want it to be something anyone can use that grows really fast. We want it to be immensely powerful and truly personalised for each student.”

Ferreira is a former executive at Kaplan, the American educational conglomerate that makes textbooks and runs online degree courses. He has an MBA from Harvard and was a campaign strategist for John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, in his presidential run in 2004.

While there are dozens of online educational tools and interactive courses provided by large textbook publishers, he claims Knewton is something different.

In a couple of seconds it can generate an entire semester of coursework tailored perfectly to the students in that particular class, he said. It can pick out those who are excelling and set them tougher homework, or offer better explanations for those who are falling behind. It can distinguish between those who are trying and failing and those who have simply not bothered. It can even detect when a student is starting to get bored and will mix up the content accordingly.

Teachers can add their own puzzles, lessons or test questions along with the results that have been generated by their own students in answering them — and get mock exams, matching the exact profile of the previous year’s tests, at the touch of a button.

Knewton can also provide detailed performance data on each child. With debate raging across the western world about how much testing is appropriate for small children, the concept of an intelligent robot analysing your child each night during homework may feel like an unnecessary, and possibly dangerous, tool.

“Different people will use it in all kinds of different ways,” said Ferreira. “But this obviates the need for constant testing.”

Ferreira is worried about his own 8-year-old son, who has been getting two hours of homework a night for the past year and spends much of his class time doing maths flashcards designed to pass a controversial New York state exam that has been boycotted by a third of parents.

“I know he’s going to be fine with ‘4+4=8’ as an adult anyway, so why take all the joy out of learning?” said Ferreira. “Knewton is going to increasingly give people — if it’s successful — the ability to know what you will do on the test before you do it. So why do the test at all?

“Rather than constantly drill kids, we can do all that algorithmically. You don’t need to give the tests any more.”

The key to Knewton is a patented piece of technology allowing the responses of one student to be used to create recommendations for others. For example, one pupil stuck on a particular element of Newton’s laws of motion might be handed a question that helped another with the same problem.

Yet the system is much more able than that, detecting how a pupil answers as well as what is answered. It will pick up on “mannerisms, tics or learning styles” from question to question, Ferreira claims — details about the way the brain works that the individual barely notices.

“It’s based on a lot of existing sciences,” said Ferreira. “In some cases we have had to advance those sciences. We have a lot of PhDs, data scientists, machine learning specialists, psychometricians, computer programmers and web designers — 80% of the company is those people.”

For several years Knewton has been used as the engine for products created by giant educational publishers, including Pearson, Relx (formerly known as Reed Elsevier), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Sesame Street network. As a result, more than 10m people have already used it.

Ferreira insisted that making the software free will not cannibalise his business because the textbook publishers still own all their content. The free-to-air platform will be populated with course materials that are already available free online.

Selling software was never Ferreira’s intention. That was just a stopgap to generate cash that could allow him to develop and expand the artificial intelligence tool he wanted to create — and build a workforce of 200 people.

“Our plan is to take [the company] public,” said Ferreira. “We have told [our investors] they should be patient because we are going after what we think is a very big area. We think that if we are successful we will be a very big company, but it will take a long time, so we have told them that.

“The other thing we have told them is that we have a double bottom line. We think we will make money but we will also judge ourselves on how much good we do. A global platform that eats so much content and gives it away to the developing world, for instance — that company has an opportunity to do real good in the world.”