INSIGHTS / News

Scale-Up member Habitat Learn, formerly Note Taking Express, is collaborating with experts at the University of Southampton to create an Artificial Intelligence-assisted note taking tool which will improve learning outcomes for students, particularly in an online or blended learning environment.

The company has been awarded an Innovate UK SMART grant to develop an online personalised learning solution, DeepPrism – in a new project worth £412k. DeepPrism uses an AI tool to create automated summary notes and generate mind-maps from lecture transcripts. The tool then builds an accessible personalised wiki-like knowledge base for learners which can be quickly and efficiently filtered and searched.

With online and blended learning expected to remain a feature of higher education learning post-pandemic and increasing numbers of international students expected to attend UK Higher Education courses remotely, students need better tools and support mechanisms to learn effectively. Remote learning is challenging note taking software with large volumes of learning materials provided to students. There is an unprecedented explosion of knowledge with billions of emails, blogs, books, and scientific papers published every day. While this exponential growth presents enormous opportunities, neither the human brain nor current technologies can cope.

Habitat Learn is working with the University of Southampton’s experts in assistive technology, Artificial Intelligence, and adaptive learning to support the development of DeepPrism and undertake student-led user testing, benchmarking, and focus groups to ensure the interface is practical and easy to use.

Professor Mike Wald, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton says: “We have worked with Habitat Learn on its products Nlive, NFeedback and now DeepPrism, we are using our expertise and research in universal design for learning, accessible technologies for students and developing appropriate learning paths for students. Working with Habitat Learn has allowed us to apply our research at scale into systems that are in use in many universities.”

DeepPrism is a web-based application enabling students to curate and use data and media in education effectively. It is a productive deep learning platform which helps students automatically create their personal wiki-style notes repository. Students can import documents and resources and the platform will link it to related content from other data repositories such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) or the internet, enriching their knowledge base. In addition, an open-domain Question-Answering (QA) system using Natural Language processing and semantic contextual matching, is used to improve subject understanding.

Habitat Learn received bid writing support to craft their Innovate UK funding bid as members of the SETsquared Scale-Up Programme.

Jeremy Brassington, Founder, Habitat Learn, says: “DeepPrism builds upon previous Innovate UK projects, NLive and NFeedback which developed an AI tool for automated summary notes from lecture transcripts. These projects enabled Habitat Learn to deliver live captioning and summary notes to students at 250 higher education institutions in the UK and North America.

“Having SETsquared’s support to bid successfully for another Innovate UK award means we can take our innovations even further with the help of the University of Southampton to create DeepPrism which will bring huge benefits to online learning.”

Find out more about the Scale-Up Programme