The ManageBac AI features allow schools to manage end user access to large-language models (LLM).

Design Goals

ManageBac AI Writing Assistant is a general-purpose utility to assist users with tasks such as generating and editing text. It was designed to be a versatile and universally-available tool across the platform. To that end, the Writing Assistant is available in all text input boxes throughout ManageBac.

ManageBac AI Writing Assistant prioritizes the user being in full control of all content that is sent to an artificial reasoning engine, and thus does not send additional hidden context. The only information sent to the LLM model is what the user has explicitly typed, as well as a standard pre-determined system prompt. For a more technical overview, please see the Prompt Engineering section of ManageBac AI: Technical Overview. 

A design goal was to ensure teachers engage their professional judgement throughout the experience of interacting with the ManageBac AI Writing Assistant. The design prioritized users giving thoughtful and intentional prompts to result in exact responses. The design de-prioritized giving users the ability  to write minimum inputs that results in comprehensive responses.

Value Proposition

ManageBac AI Writing Assistant is provided as a service embedded throughout the platform as a general purpose utility. Other utilities offering a similar feature set may or may not offer the same level of guarantees about data retention and model training that is suitable for regular usage in the education sector.

For more information about safety and safeguarding features, please see the Safeguarding section of ManageBac AI: Technical Overview. For further information about data retention and model training of external tools, please review the respective third-party service agreements.

Effective prompt writing

Given that the intended usage is as a general purpose utility that provides results based on what has been explicitly provided by the user, here are some examples of effective prompts:

For a unit plan:

• "Help me write a short description for an MYP unit on Ancient Civilizations for grade 10 students that includes cultural achievements"
  

For a discussion forum:

• "Prompt students to submit what ancient civilizations they wish to explore in this unit, including research strategies for middle school students"

For a learning experience, adding aims or objectives:

• "Suggest some possible objectives for a student-led project to supplement their learning by visiting local museums"

For a term grade comment:

• "Write a comment that summarizes a student's academic performance that could be improved through better use of note-taking."

Effectively iterating on responses

In addition to writing effective prompts, more often than not, effective use of artificial intelligence benefits from additional clarifications. 

For example, to the unit plan prompt above, ManageBac AI Writing Assistant may respond with the following:

This MYP unit on Ancient Civilizations for grade 10 students explores the rich tapestry of human history, focusing on the cultural achievements of early societies. Students will delve into the innovations, art, architecture, and literature of ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Through a variety of engaging activities, they will investigate how these achievements have shaped modern culture and society. The unit aims to develop a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of human endeavors and the lasting legacies of ancient cultures.

Upon reviewing, the teacher can direct the AI to adjust the response to be more appropriate to the given context. For example, they can use pre-determined prompts such as "Fewer words" to make it more concise. Teachers can also provide additional instructions, and the AI will build upon the previous response.

These are some examples of how the first prompt might be further improved through additional prompting:

• "Restate to indicate that students will have their choice of civilizations to choose from"
• "Change the description to include that students will contextualize their learning through applications to their experienced culture"

Subsequent suggestions will improve upon the initial response. For example, after entering the above two prompts after the first one, and then selecting "Fewer words," the response improves to the following:

This MYP unit on Ancient Civilizations for grade 10 students explores human history, focusing on the cultural achievements of early societies. Students will delve into the innovations, art, architecture, and literature of the civilization of their choice. Through a variety of engaging activities, the unit aims to develop a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between ancient cultures and draw meaningful connections between historical content and their own cultural backgrounds.

In this way, teachers can review and further revise until reaching a desired result. Additional improvements can be made manually by selecting "Keep" which will place the current result into the text editor for further adjustments. Previous responses are saved and can be recalled with a back and forward button, which gives the user the flexibility to select the best response.

Responsible Use

In summary, the LLM does not "already know" some information that is available elsewhere in ManageBac or from another source. ManageBac AI Writing Assistant is tuned to be highly effective at generating suggestions that can be further incorporated into a final version, giving the author full responsibility for the final input.