Gooru: Personalized Learning with Generative AI

Gooru: Generative AI for Personalized Learning

• Gooru aimed to create a personalized learning cloud infrastructure for every school, institution, and learning platform provider
• A key question for Gooru was whether it could adequately scale while still operating as a nonprofit

Company Overview

• Gooru was established in 2011 by Dr. Prasad Ram as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
• Ram previously directed research and engineering at Google and headed Google Maps, Google News, Translation, Google Books for Education, and Google Ads India
• Gooru's personalized learning tech merged transdisciplinary research with practice, engaging curriculum designers, content and tool providers, app developers, researchers, and implementers for lifelong learning internationally
• Gooru’s differentiating values encompassed:
  • Passion to inspire elegant solutions, fostering community engagement in Gooru's mission
  • Collaboration to build success, valuing shared responsibility
  • Actions with impact, focusing on tangible outcomes for scalable solutions.
• Gooru received over $35 million in grants supporting technology development from foundations, government, and corporations over its first 12 years

Challenges and Solutions

• Gooru recognized continuous learning as essential for individuals to stay competitive in a rapidly changing technological world
• Gooru aimed to address multiple challenges via the large-scale implementation of learning, like:
  • Support lifelong learning from pre-K to professional levels
  • Support learning across digital resources, offline tasks, and group projects
  • Offer a broad choice in learning methodologies
  • Be effective even in low-tech environments

Gooru Navigator

• Gooru developed technology that provided all learners with personalized pathways to their learning goals
• Gooru aggregated content, tools, curriculum, research, and apps from providers worldwide
• The core of Gooru's technology was Navigator, called "a GPS for learning," which is a cloud-based, AI-powered personal tutor
• Navigator would assess a students knowledge, then generate a personalized pathway of learning activities
• Gooru's Navigated Learning (GLN) sought to understand learners holistically and would recommend and curate personalized learning pathways
• The GLN software would locate the learner, seek input on the desired proficiency level, and then identify a path using learning resources within the Gooru system
• Course corrections are suggested if needed based on student performance
• The library within Navigator included supplemental materials for math, science, and English language arts courses for grades 2-12, including over 4 million open resources
• Navigator was designed to provide real-time insights and recommendations to teachers, school leadership, and parents

Technology Put to Use

• The core of Gooru's tech was Navigator, "a GPS for learning," accessible via devices
• The Navigator assesses knowledge and generates a personalized pathway of learning activities
• Navigator aggregates resources from school content providers and open education resources, used in accordance with licensing terms
• For a tenth-grade student learning economics, Gooru would evaluate knowledge of math, finance, and reading to provide the educator with the student's strengths, areas for improvement, and learning opportunities
• Navigator established Skylines for users based on their résumés compared against career models
• Users' Hi-lines (Job Lines) were generated based on job descriptions, curated content, courses, and programs for the different jobs

Navigated Learning Collaborative

• Gooru supported the collective intelligence of education stakeholders via the Navigated Learning Collaborative (NLC)
• Educators, researchers, and developers of tools could use the NLC to seek and exchange data
• School districts contributed to the development of the Gooru Navigator by using it for core subjects and providing usability feedback

Gooru Developer Network (GDN)

• The Gooru Developer Network (GDN) provided technical info for software developers to configure and manage communication between an API and internal and external systems including documentation
• GDN aimed to generate more output than a single team of developers could produce

Impact of Navigator on Learning

• A multi-year assessment found that learning growth was 1.8 times the national norm
• One study found that competencies gained through Navigator correlated with improved scores on standardized tests, increasing scores by 1.5 points
• Remedial math students using Navigator found statistically significant correlations between competencies gained and gains in standardized test scores

Gooru's N=1, R=G Theory Practice

• The foundation of N=1, R=G theory is that each customer can co-create the highest quality of personalized experience using a digital platform of global resources
• Gooru created a platform that did not change the learning community but "empowered the existing ecosystem"
• Gooru presented each student with N=1 learning experiences through orchestration of community resources

Gooru's Customer Base

• Gooru's customers ranged from U.S. K-12 schools to the U.S. Department of Defense and SAP
• Gooru Navigator was used internationally for K-12 learning in India, South Africa, and the Middle East
• Gooru pledged to ensure privacy, data security, and transparency to create a sustainable approach and scalable for the emergence of appropriate local solutions

How to Do More

• Gooru planned to scale its operations to improve education and assure mastery in learning and career growth, aiming to grow from one million users in 2023 to 40 million by 2026
• Key areas of focus were as follows:
  • License Gooru Navigator as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
  • Enhance the AI
  • Growing the network of collaborators