Announcing AI MicroApps for Education

And What are MicroApps?

TL;DR: A free and open-source tool for creating AI-powered, instructor guided apps for course development and assessment.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been immersed in this AI conversation. Learning from educators and instructional designers with greater perspective than me about how they use AI and how they want to use AI in their classrooms.

8 months ago, I started experimenting with small customizable tools that are powered by AI and guided by…you, the educator! 

I’ve spent the last several months refining the approach and documenting this so that anyone can build their own tools for their classroom. The result of that is “AI MicroApps”: https://appsforeducation.ai, a series of tools and resources built around a free, open-source (MIT License) tool so that educators can customize their own apps for their own classroom. Educators are already working with MicroApps to build course development tools like question generators and rubric creators, and assessment tools for their students like AI debates and critical thinking exercises. These tools are customized for their classroom and guided by their own voice. 

The conversation around AI in education is rich and nuanced. But the themes that keep coming up are despite the opportunities afforded by AI, it is still too unreliable and expensive for use in the classroom, and there are too many tools to choose from. MicroApps are a controllable, cost-effective and flexible way that alleviate several of these issues so we can bring AI into the classroom in an intelligent and pedagogically sound way:

“AI is unreliable” (the hallucination issue)

At this point, nothing can fix the hallucination issue. So the best we can do is apply AI in a controlled, consistent way for tasks that we know it does well. 

AI has a tendency to hallucinate most when it faces novel situations and incomplete training data. Guidance from an instructor in the form of background context, intelligent prompting, and testing can reduce these hallucinations.

“AI is expensive”

$20/m per user, per tool is expensive.

Paying for AI usage can be cheap. You can generate about 100 MCQ questions for a standard course for about a penny (USD). A three-round debate between a student and AI costs about 1/10 of one penny (USD). That means that you could offer 100 students an ai-powered debate about the week’s content for about 10 cents (USD). 

“There are too many tools. Even choosing a few would be too pricey and over-complicate my tech stack. “

Most tools offer some kind of “wrapper” on top of an LLM or other AI model. Often, that wrapper makes assumptions about pedagogy and forces you into a particular AI model. A single, free tool that allows you to build these “wrappers” can eliminate the need for dozens of tools and protect your pedagogy in the process. 

Along with this, I’m building and sharing one app per week for 52 weeks, so that educators can see how to build these and be inspired about what might be possible for their classroom. You can subscribe to this Substack or follow me on LinkedIn to keep up with these. And if you have an idea for an app and you’d like to have me build it, just reach out and I’ll try to add it to my queue. 

Here is how you can support this: 

• Use the tool and tell me what you hate about it or what you want it to do that it doesn’t. 

• If you don’t have time or don’t feel comfortable with the tool yet, let me know what you want to build. I can probably build it and add it to the gallery of apps. 

• Sign up for the substack to follow my “52 apps in 52 weeks” series where I’ll design and share an AI app for education each week. 

• Sign up as an Alpha tester for the upcoming no-code product. 

• Like, comment, and share this post with educators who want to make AI work for them. 

After hundreds of conversations and dozens of experiments with AI in education, I believe that AI will only work for our industry when educators feel that they have control over the AI experience in their own classroom. This is a first step towards providing that to educators. There is more to come, but for now let’s raise the flag of “Agency over AI for Educators”.