Giving Compass' Take:

• Writing assistant Quill.org has a tool called Quill Connect, that uses machine learning to help students improve their writing through online exercises.

• What are the challenges and learning curves for educators when incorporating more advanced tech into their teaching? How can funders increase access to and productive use of edtech? 

• Here are the benefits and limitations of machine learning in education.


Just like the students Quill.org aims to help, the writing assistant’s algorithms get smarter the more they practice.

The nonprofit’s Quill Connect tool, designed to improve students’ writing skills through online exercises, uses machine learning to help them create better sentences. As Quill Connect gains more data, its algorithms morph and improve, says Peter Gault, Quill’s executive director — enabling it to address the big issues of sentence fragments and run-ons.

For teachers, it was such a big challenge to implement this type of instruction. It is so time-intensive. It was always a challenge to have time to give feedback.

Online tools weren’t always the best answer, since combining thoughts and sentences can yield thousands of correct results. So Quill built out a series of algorithms that can distinguish strong sentences from weak ones.

That is where machine learning comes in.

The algorithm looks at common patterns and criteria for strong and weak sentences, Gault says, and is now able to detect sentence fragments at 84 percent accuracy.

Read the full article on machine learning by Tim Newcomb at The 74.