 Hello everybody. Welcome to our session with Dr. Tracy Elliott. Dr. Tracy Elliott is the Dean of Library and an instructor at Florida Gulf Coast University. Myself is Eran Segal. I am the founder and former CEO of Aletheia, currently Center Director of Product over at Clarivate. So the pain that we address over at Aletheia caters to the heart of the higher education system and it is the lack of preparation or the gap of in preparation between K-12 and higher ed, coupled with the decline in proficiency and really comprehension leads to an incredibly termiless period of onboarding in first year of college, which yields lower confidence, increased feeling of distress, mental distress, which ultimately cumulate in rising DFW rates. It's so unsurprising then with the advent of the machine at the tail end of 2021, with the rise of ChedGBT, we're seeing a huge increased utilization of those machines for less than pristine causes. Tracy, what have you been seeing? Exactly. I've been in libraries for a long time, over 30 years, and as a library and teaching information literacy and doing assessments of that work that we do, we find that students have a very difficult time summarizing evidence from a text and then synthesizing it into their paper. And this goes from freshman year all the way to graduate school. As an instructor, I continue to see that from the instructor side. I teach in library science and in education. So that has been really frustrating for me to see students struggle with the ability to really be able to take a piece of evidence or a source and summarize it succinctly. That's exactly our mission, right? So the idea of Aletheia, which started at the very beginning of the age of the lockdown periods in 2020, the idea there was to facilitate for self-directed and self-regulated learning by leveraging scientifically proven behavioral psychology and metacognitive processes, essentially leaning on the work of Richard Emeyers. And then later on to blend it with generative AI that does exactly the opposite or flips the script on the common use case of tools such as JetGPT by actually offering students kind of like a Socratic interlocutor that would offer these leveraging scaffolding questions to help the students get deeper into the core of the matter. The whole point here is to drive and elevate students' capacity to think critically and to engage meaningfully with the academic text. Tracy, this is exactly our point of partnership, I think. To do this by no means pushes the instructor out of the picture, right? The whole point here is to offer the instructors these kind of like ironman suits, right? Like to supercharge them and to complement their own unique individual personal learning style and objectives and to offer them actionable insights into the course readings and into the students individual. So with that, let us take a quick look into the demo and we'll be back. We'll take more of a conversation with Dr. Elliott. There are three steps in Alithia's standard task. In step one, the students surveys the task and six relevant passages that answer the instructor's question. In step two, they will review their selections from the previous step and converse with our AI-driven academic coach. And in step three, the students will submit a full open-ended answer to their instructor's questions. Let's get a bit deeper. Upon entering the task, the student is to take a moment and soak in the question assigned by the instructor. These questions establish the foundational learning objectives and trace the way forward. As the student goes through the text, they are purposefully seeking answers to correlate with the questions, thus shifting the reading experience to an active and focused procedure. As they do so, they are also compiling external memory banks for each unique question. This novel approach to academic reading also allows our users to maintain reading fluency and focus and to avoid attention splitting and distractions. In step two, the student goes deeper and review their selections from the previous step. Once they get a grip on their selections, the student may start the conversations with Alithia's academic coach. Alithia's academic coach flips the script on the widespread academic misuse of tools like chat GPT both figuratively and literally. Instead of the student delegating their work to the machine, Alithia's academic coach is the one that's asking the questions, prompting the student to deeply and critically engage with the reading materials. Think of it as an automating teaching assistant at scale. The coach is designed to quote-on-quote understand the text, how the instructor's questions relate to it, and the selections made by the student. Through scaffolding leading questions, the coach supports the student in forming a strong answer. When the conversations conclude, the coach aggregates the student's responses and auto-generates an answer based on the student's own input and unique voice. As such, Alithia provides the institution with guardrails to protect from abuse of generative AI technology by leveraging generative AI technology in an academically responsible way. Tracy, obviously, as you've introduced yourself and we know very, very well, you were multiple heads, right? One of them being your head as the dean of the library over at FGCU and the other is the dean or the instructor, right? Your professor hat. And with that, I'll like to start with you being the dean of the library. So, both us together and you and your own device have had rather unique experiences talking to different stakeholders in the university. The dean of digital learning, the provost. And of course, more and more engaged interactions with the instructors. How do you see Alithia fit in with your vision of the library of the tomorrow, right? The university library of the tomorrow. Share it with us. As you said, it puts the text front and center in the classroom. And it is the basis for all learning. And the library invests, the university provides the library the funding to invest in millions and millions of dollars worth of resources that is arguably underutilized. And regardless of what institution you're at. And what this does is it allows the faculty to build a course around those materials that the library purchases. But not just what they purchase, but the primary resources that they are collecting in our institutional repositories and in our digital archives for special collections in the university archives. So, it elevates the role of the resources that the library is providing. Not only that, as I said, it helps us to get to our end game with information literacy. We find when we do assessments that students find wonderful sources. They're authoritative. They're peer reviewed. They're all the things that we want them to have in their papers and to use as evidence. But what we find is they don't know how to use them as evidence. They either don't understand what they're reading so they're interpreted incorrectly or there's no connection at all between their sources and what they're writing. And so for the library, it's a natural fit. It's something that I can't imagine any library dean would see and not want to learn more about it because it is even opened up for us faculty who now want to replace their textbooks that by using Alethea, they realize just how much that textbook falls short on what they're trying to teach their students. And they feel like it's more of a distraction than a hell. So we can help them as librarians, we can help them find alternative resources or even build their own textbook. So that has been a win-win here at FGCU in so many ways. So it puts the library front and center. It involved in the building of the curriculum been also leading to showing the library and our resources and services impact on student success. We discussed the Provo strategic aims, right? That fits right in there? Absolutely. And in Florida, we have this wonderful thing called performance funding metric. That's all about our students meeting student success factors. So things like graduation in four years, six-year graduation rate, Pell Grant six-year graduation rate, etc. You know underrepresented minority, performance gap, those kind of things. So this tool is proving to level the planning field and for the provost, that's all he needs to hear because his goal of course is for every student at our university to be successful and meet their goals and preferably in a way that lets them achieve the learning objectives of the programs that they're in and graduate on time and be prepared for life and for their their careers. One of the main goals of Aletheor, objectives of Aletheor was to provide instructors with this different or perhaps even unprecedented lens right into the progress, development or you know needs of the students in the classroom as a whole. How have you been utilizing Aletheor? Can you tell us more what kind of insights you've been gaining out of that? Well, I agree about the insight. So for me, I feel like I've stolen Alice's looking glass and now I can see exactly where I lose my students either in my lectures or or in the text right. So when I ask them a question in Aletheor and they can't answer, they can't find the answer in the text or they find the answer and they can't put it in their own words. To me, that means that they don't understand what the text is telling them and what I'm telling them. So whatever the author is telling them. And that allows me to readjust and change my teaching. So I can then quickly create a lecture. I can provide other resources to them so that they can hear it in a different way than the way that I'm teaching if I feel like, well, no matter how I say it, I'm not saying it right or not saying in a way that they can understand it. So maybe I should use all other resources or find other assignment that will help them understand better how to apply what they're learning. While on that topic, right? So Aletheor always has been on this handshake, so to speak, right between faculty and the students. How does that translate? I mean, how effective are we in our mission, right? And this is like the foundational blocks of any metacognitive theory, right? To strengthen students' identity as such as a student, right? To strengthen their sense of belonging to a classroom, to a curriculum, to a syllabus. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm engaged in a research project right now using Bandora's self-efficacy theory of students. And what I have learned from my, and I had an inkling, right? I figured they weren't reading because it was showing that they weren't reading the course materials. And then when I learned after I started using Aletheor, as they were reading, but they still suffered from sort of an imposter syndrome, whether they actually believed they couldn't learn from reading textbooks. They were very, very dependent on direct quoting and paraphrasing the text, which of course does not demonstrate whether or not they truly understand. What I heard from my students is, oh, so many great things. Some of them, as a matter of fact, quite a few of them said they hated Aletheor in the beginning, but by the end, they realized how much they had learned in the course. Because we gave them, or I gave them, enough opportunity to apply what they learned, and they realized for the first time how much better their writing was and how much better their comprehension was of these very important and technical. In this regard, some kind of exposure therapy almost, right? It's not supposed to be easy, right? I mean, I always make this analogy to the world of, you know, exercise or gym, right? Nobody likes to start exercising. It hurts, it sucks, even in the beginning, right? But then it's supposed to happen, right? A process. What do we see at the end, Tracy? Have you been able to see the monstrative, quantitative changes in your students on, like, capacity to succeed? Absolutely. Like I said, their writing has improved so much. Their comprehension, their ability to meet the learning objectives of the course have just, or the courses have been just amazing. I teach a course for the College of Education on interpreting, well, finding and interpreting and using primary research in the field of education and related topics. So one of the things that I learned immediately is that my students had no idea how to interpret the findings of a primary research study. And now, by the end of my course, they're all able to do it. Some of them, like you said, it's harder for them than others. But because I can find where they're, where I'm losing them, I'm able to course correct and get them back on, on task. And I don't have to do that for everyone. But I'm able to reach out to those students that really need a little bit more instruction or just a different type of instruction. We found that when they take this course, my course, and then they take the applied research course, they do so much better. They, they catch on so much faster. And then their, their overall results in the course are so much better. And so that transfer of learning is happening. And that is so exciting. Incredible. Has, have you seen this actually being translated into a change of in grades or their past fail rates? So I had talked to Dr. Alta, who teaches the other course, and she said that she saw an immediate difference between the students that she had in fall of 2023, and the students that she had in the fall of 2024 or 2022. So she had much higher success rates. And I did as well. There is a culminating assignment in both of our courses, in which the average grade, for me, on that culminating assignment was a D. And for her, it was a C. And those have now moved to mine is now an A and hers is a B. So that's a huge, it hurts the heart of course. So to get a B in her course is really phenomenal. And that that's the average grade is just, it is a high B, like B plus. So we're really excited by these results. I feel like I'm getting better as an instructor. So I think our students are going to continue to benefit from the improvement in my teaching. Well, one of the things I keep telling the provost is that we have yet to have a faculty member who has used Alivia to want to stop using Alivia. They all want to use it. And now most of us are using it in every single course that we teach. And so because we know how powerful it is, I remember when we all saw for the first time a rejected name, right? We anonymized view of an engagement between a student in her course and the Alivia coach and even her mouth dropped open. We were like, this is incredible. She's it sounds like it looks like the student is talking to a business faculty member about business concepts and business strategy. And it was just a beautiful thing to see. And who knows when it happened. It could have been happening at two o'clock in the morning. So the students have access to this type of assistance that the university could never provide, could never provide on a consistent basis. We even have our associate vice president of student success view the result. And he said the same thing. He's in charge of tutoring and other support services for our students. And he is blown away by the tool. It's just been phenomenal. And every time we've asked students, if you have this available to you outside of class, would you use it? There's not one student that said no, not one. So students are finding Alivia to be incredibly helpful for them. And and they want to continue using it. As I said before, I could we couldn't ask for better partners. We can ask for more such partners. And we do. In this partnership is unbelievable to us. Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation. Looking forward to many more semesters and successes together. Thank you so much. Thank you.