Noodle Factory
Introduction
Noodle Factory is an AI teaching and learning assistant that can:
- automate tasks like tutoring, grading, and student engagement
- reduce educator's workload
- easily input course content and use NLP algorithms to create a knowledge base.
- allows students to complete assessments and receive immediate, personalized feedback, without requiring direct educator involvement.
Noodle Factory uses chatbot to provide automated real-time feedback to student.
Summary of research
Purpose: To explore the following questions:
· How does it bring value to our system?
Findings:
1. The core function : Enhance learning experience and assisting students during their assessment activities by providing automated instant feedback via Chatbot.
2. The system has the potential to help students with tutoring (Chatbot will prompt student to go read related topics when they answered wrongly) and assessments (system able to grade student's open ended answer based on answer set by teacher) using AI-generated content and automated grading. This benefits educator - Save time.
3. However, it has a lot of competition. In example: https://quizgecko.com/features can do whatever Noodle Factory can do, with extra features such as able to generate questions from YouTube videos and generate illustrations / images to quizzes, using AI to generate copyright free art. (Can we request this feature from Noodle Factory as part of our requirement?)
4. Noodle Factory can only be useful if there is proper setup. Note: if we choose to integrate Chatbot feature into our system, BeED will require to provide additional support to our clients as it is hard to set up.
Final recommendation
I suggest against partnering with them because of their limited capabilities. Their primary advantages are the ability to produce documents from uploaded files and to automatically generate content. The majority of schools already have lesson plans in place, and ChatGPT can help educators create relevant Q&A, summaries, and learning objectives. They rely on an internet connection for the chatbot, which is contrary to what we are trying to do. And if we collaborate with them, BeED will need to provide additional support in order to assist our current client with the complex setup of their chatbot.
Feature Highlights:
Assessment Tools: Supports more answer formats: MCQ, checkbox, Text, Bullet, table, Group Question and Mapping.
Auto Grading: The Noodle Factory system offers a more advanced auto-grading feature compared to BeED, particularly for open-ended questions. This feature can assess open-ended questions based on predefined teacher-recommended answers. Cons: it can only assign a full mark or no mark, lacking the ability to recognize partially correct answers.
(Click here to see sample for Assessment Tools and Auto Grading)
AI-Generated Content: User can upload lesson materials (Supported File types: .docx, pdf, pptx) AI able to generate relevant summaries, learning outcomes, and Q&A. Cons: may not always be accurate, teachers still need to review the content.
System Limitations: Several limitations were identified, including constraints on the number document pages (20-page limit), file sizes (Max: 10MB), and number of website pages (20-Page limit), and system unable to generate Q&A for document with less text, more graphics.
Limited Features: It doesn't have a lot of features that BeED can benefit from.
Support: Tutorial videos do not help setting up the chatbot. Teachers might need to contact customer support for help or even ask for a demonstration.
Improvement suggestion
- Partnering with Noodle factory can be good for short term solution to lack of AI in our system. But in a long term, I believe BeED have the resources to develop our own AI teaching features.
- We can learn from their friendly user interface for data analytics.
- BeED can work on developing auto grading feature for open ended questions.
Results
SWOT Analysis :
Table below shows features of the system and its description.
| No. | Feature | Feature description | Good / Bad | Description | Improvement suggestion |
|
1
|
Upload files
|
User able to upload documents to their knowledge base and use AI to generate Learning Outcomes, Quiz, and curate learning pathway (Supported File types: .docx, pdf, pptx)
|
Bad | Max file size to upload : 10MB. Adding teacher’s task to find pdf compressor. Hard to compress for larger docs. | After researching, E-book files that contains a lot of graphics can go up to more than 100MB. Additionally, other user can upload max file size up to 100MB. - Glitch? |
| Good | Option to extract information from a website | BeED should have this option to generate content directly from website. IE:Wikipedia | |||
| Bad | Unable to extract information from youtube Videos (Link) | ||||
|
2
|
Uploaded document summary Generator
|
automatically generates summary of its key points, main ideas, and important details of the uploaded document. From this summary, you can generate learning outcome, Q&A, Quizzes, and add to learning pathway
|
Bad | Have limitation in creating summary. Page Limit only allow maximum of 20 pages. | |
| Bad | Generated summary is not entirely accurate, but it is still quite helpful. Teacher need to read again to ensure the details are correct. | ||||
| Bad | Summarising wikipedia page is limited to page limit. For a long wikipedia page, this will cause an issue | ||||
| 3 | Learning Outcomes Generator | Use AI to generate statements that describes what students are expected to learn, understand, or be able to do by the end of a lesson | Good | System able to read uploaded notes even though the note contained watermark with irregular content arrangement. | AI is smart enough to recommend relevant Learning Outcome even from notes with irregular section / watermark |
|
4
|
Q&A Generator
|
Automatically extracts relevant questions and answers from the uploaded website or document, then automatically stored in Knowledge Base
|
Good | Able to generate Q&A from uploaded document. Might not be accurate but user can choose to edit or delete the Q&A. Directly save into knowledge base once done. | This feature is good to have. Q&A generator is not entirely accurate but it does help cut down time to come up with set of questions |
| Bad | Unable to generate Q&A for certain document (Notes with less text, more graphics). Tried multiple times | ||||
|
5
|
Quizes Generator
|
Automatically generates quiz questions and answers based on the information stored in a knowledge database.
|
Good | User can auto generate wrong answers for MCQ | |
| Bad | Not consistent. Given the wrong suggestion for certain question. | ||||
| Good | Question block have various answer format: MCQ, checkbox, Text, Bullet, table, Group Question, Mapping. System able to grade student answer by keyword. | ||||
|
6
|
Conversation Flow / Chatbot
|
When students start a session, they will receive a welcome message. Then student will see button prompts that guide students to the next piece of knowledge they should know. Teachers can add knowledge, quizzes and forms to the flow.
|
Good | Provide student with real time feedback and personalized answers. Chatbot can act as interactive teaching assistant | |
| Bad | Hard to Set Up. | Pathway too broad. Might get complicated. Test setup fail (does not appear in student's view) | |||
| 7 | Forms | Consists of various fields, prompts, and interactive elements designed to collect specific information or responses from users | Bad | Unable to review forms response on the website as it only shows how many submission made. User should able to access student's feedback/answers through website | |
|
8
|
Supported language
|
-
|
Good | Support 36 languages | |
| Bad | Does not support Malaysian Language. | ||||
|
9
|
Autograding
|
Automatically evaluates and scores student assignments or tests,
|
Good | System able to use AI to grade Open ended question referring to recommended answer set by teacher | BeED system can only support manual grading for open ended question |
| Bad | MCQ multiple answer: System not able to set up partially correct answer auto grading | System will give full mark if student choose all the correct answer ONLY |
Supported languages :
Daily Highlights
| 1 | It is important for a software/system to create a step by step tutorial, so user can easily understand. The tutorial video need to be very precise, especially for a complex system. User should be able to quickly access tutorial video or system support. |
| 2 | We can learn from Noodle Factory on how to create a better gradebook/analytics page. The way they show quizzes activities is really impressive. The grading system also able to integrate with canvas gradebook. |
| 3 | The trickiest element to examine on this system is the Conversation Flow feature. User needs more time to become familiar to utilizing this feature with the little knowledge they learned from the tutorial video. Some instructors might give up and stop using it altogether. For BeED, we should concentrate on simplifying the user experience so that they can take full advantage of the feature. |
| 4 | System is smart enough to mark an open response question referring to a sample answer. BeED system still requires teacher to manually grade student's answer and I believe Noodle Factory is ahead of us in this area. They also have more answer format to choose from, and setting up marking system for each question type is user friendly. |
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