How Quizalize Boosts Learning For 4m People Learning: Q/A with CEO Charles Wiles

Welcome to another interview by Website Planet. Bringing you insights on how the best companies are solving the current challenges in their industry and how they are planning ahead for the future.

Our guest today is Charles Wiles, CEO of Zzish, who explained how their AI learning app, Quizalize, has helped 4 million teachers and students accelerate learning and improve exam scores by up to 10% in 2023, and how they plan to implement virtual reality.

Introduce Quizalize to our audience

Quizalize is an app that uses gamification & AI to help teachers engage students and personalize learning.

We’re making waves at Zzish!

Last year more than 4 million teachers and students used Quizalize in the classroom to help accelerate learning. Plus, Quizalize has been proven to boost end of year exam scores by 8-10% and close the achievement gap by 12% and students answered a whopping 200 million questions on Quizalize in the last 12 months.

The US market is booming and is our main market, but we have paying schools and teachers in 87 countries around the world. Our leading international markets include the Philippines, Indonesia, Greece and Bahrain.

What are the key challenges in your industry right now?

The EdTech space is grappling with two key challenges: ensuring equitable access to technology for all students and navigating the ethical implementation of AI in the classroom. This includes mitigating bias in AI algorithms, ensuring transparency in data use, and fostering human-AI collaboration for a more effective learning experience. On top of this, teachers are still struggling to catch up on covid learning loss. School children fell behind during the pandemic years.

Can EdTech help with solving this and helping students catch up with where they should be?

How are people trying to solve these issues, and why are these solutions not ideal?

There’s a big push in EdTech for generative AI as a content creation tool for teachers. While AI holds promise, relying solely on it is risky. In fact, generative AI might not capture the specific needs of a curriculum or individual students. Additionally, teachers need control to curate and refine AI output.

A better approach combines existing, pre-vetted content from EdTech databases with teacher expertise to shape and adapt materials for specific learning goals. This empowers teachers and fosters deeper student engagement, which is crucial for educators.

How do you solve these problems in a better way?

At Quizalize, we recognized the limitations of solely generative AI for teachers. That’s why we were one of the first to integrate it with our massive database of existing, high-quality content. This gives teachers a starting point, but the real power lies in their control. They can easily amend and improve any AI-generated content we offer.

Additionally, our validation system shows usage statistics, reassuring educators that other teachers have found the AI-generated content valuable.

Quizalize prioritizes a collaborative environment where AI, years of curated teacher content, and teacher control co-exist. This focus on teacher empowerment is what truly sets our AI tools apart.

What new challenges and opportunities do you see coming in the future?

We are currently using AI to help teachers create and mark assessments more effectively. But the next step is how to use AI to provide one on one personalized instruction in the classroom.

AI powered virtual tutors are still not quite there and often make mistakes, particularly with mathematics. However things are moving quickly and the technology is improving all the time. The classroom in five years time will look very different to the classroom today.

How do you plan to adapt to these changes?

One area we are working on is combining AI and VR to provide students with truly immersive learning environments, particularly for language learning. Imagine putting on a VR headset and finding yourself under the Eiffel tower having a conversation with a Parisien gendarme. This is not a prefixed conversation of selecting from canned answers, but a fluid conversation with a character that has personality and opinion. We are less than 12 months away from such things becoming reality.