Expanding Education Through Tech and STEM Accessibility with Numerade Co-Founder Alex Lee

On this episode of How We Made That App, embark on a captivating journey into STEM education with host Madhukar Kumar and the Co-Founder of the brilliant app Numerade Alex Lee! 

Alex gives an in-depth and fascinating fusion of philosophy and technology that propels Numerade's innovative learning platform. Alex unveils the intricate layers of AI and machine learning models that power their educational ecosystem. Beyond the present, he explores the promising future integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering a glimpse into the next frontier of education.

Numerade is more than just AI and LLM enhancements, Alex emphasizes the human touch woven into Numerade's approach. Discover the impact of meaningful interactions on the learning experience and the deliberate efforts to maintain a personal connection in the digital realm. Alex envisions growth by seamlessly aligning Numerade's services with the dynamic advancements in AI, creating a bridge between cutting-edge technology and genuine human engagement.

Tune in as this episode unravels the philosophy, technology, and human-centric approach that define Numerade's quest to revolutionize STEM education.

Key Quotes:

• “Our thesis has always been that when it comes to learning this complex material, it's so much more effective to be able to get sight and sound. So, to be able to sit down, have in front of you an expert educator, who's walking you through the video. Speaking to you, the high-level concepts, guiding you through the various skills that are required to be able to tackle that problem. That's what we found really, really constructive to the learning cycle for our students.”
• “One thing that we do also in the background, and this is where AI and machine learning comes in, is being able to create holistic end-to-end experiences that really stitch together a lot of these different videos to provide something that takes the student through the whole journey of learning something first at a conceptual level. So really building that knowledge foundation. So, for example, understanding what momentum even is. And then gradually as they're building that knowledge framework, we're giving them more discrete items and problems for them to solve. And that way we're doing more of that skill building aspect. So really honing in on how do you solve momentum questions and equations.”
• “When we were experiencing growth, the one thing that we realized was, sitting students down and conducting these more qualitative feedback sessions with them, getting them into focus groups. That wasn't really all that scalable. It works really, really well, and it's still something that we do today, but as the amount of traffic that you get on the site, as the number of users that begin interacting with our content, as that number starts to grow, there needs to be better ways for us to gain these deeper insights. And that's where we started the exploration of  how do we best set a system up for  ingesting all of the con, all of the data that's being created by our users during their time interacting with our site.”
• “Right now from all of the data that we're able to see, humans will, at least in the immediate future, still be a very much a part of the human experience in the learning experience. And I think the reason behind that is just because the learning experience is also inherently human. And you have to have some of that human element behind it to really effectuate great learning.”

Timestamps

• (1:08) Numerade’s origins
• (5:00) Expanding education in the TikTok era
• (11:10) Building Numerade through existing technologies
• (17:05) Using product-led growth to expand Numerade
• (21:05) Using LLMs and AI to utilize Numerade
• (29:35) Quick Hits

Links

Connect with Alex

Visit Numerade

Connect with Madhukar

Visit SingleStore