ChatGPT might not have quite taken over the world…yet, but it has certainly sent chills down the spines of educators everywhere. Students can request that it write their papers for them or have it solve a full page of math problems in the time it takes to scan them into the system. Is this the end of education as we know it? Not so fast, says MasteryPrep Founder and CEO, Craig Gehring. “The fears about these enabling technologies miss one key fact,” he says, “students want to learn."

He would know. MasteryPrep, headquartered in Baton Rouge, partners with school districts to provide help with high-stakes tests like the ACT, SAT, LEAP, etc so that students can graduate on time and have success when they reach college. They provide equitable prep for over 450 thousand students in over 2 thousand school districts all across the country.

Gehring says that emerging technologies do make it easier for students to cheat, but if they choose to do so, it shows there’s a gap in aligning them with an interest in learning. Ultimately, it’s a high-tech problem with a low-tech solution - just like always, students must be “bought-in” to their learning. 

MasteryPrep learned that lesson early on. Their lessons always start with some sort of hook to give students an on-ramp for the subject. This allows students to have early success which excites them and makes them hungry for more success. Once the students are hooked, they are able to be led through a dynamic platform that continues to actively engage them.

“We use emerging technology on the backend to support a platform that includes videos that feel like a back-and-forth conversation instead of just someone talking at them about a subject for 10 minutes. We can identify where in the process the students are getting hung up and directly address that. The students are given the tools to work immediately on the areas where they’re weak, and the teachers and admins are given deep analytics that provide information on each student’s progress and data on the class as a whole.”

In practice, this looks like the platform realizing that a student understands a concept in theory, but can’t apply that information in a real-world example. It recognizes where the missing step is occurring and gives the student instant tools to remediate it before swinging back around to the main thread of the lesson. This keeps the student from feeling overly frustrated and makes sure that they stay engaged in the learning. 

All of this plays into MasteryPrep’s mission to provide equitable resources to underserved students. Gehring explains that “we live in an information age, not a knowledge age.” While theoretically students could just google whatever information they need for a class…or ask ChatGPT to explain it to them, it doesn’t mean that everyone has the ability to turn that vast sea of information into the deep knowledge that they need to succeed. MasteryPrep acts as a guide to bring targeted information to all students at the right time. 

All this analytical targeting allows teachers to do what they do best: develop the human relationships that are necessary for learning. “Imagine if the Karate Kid had just watched some YouTube videos. That wouldn’t have gotten him very far,” laughs Gehring. “Teachers are irreplaceable. Our products are designed to be teacher tools. Everything we make includes teacher guides and resources. Also, we know that it’s very difficult for learning to happen in a synchronous environment because if just one student’s laptop isn’t working, it can throw off the whole lesson. Our tech products are designed to be asynchronous so the student can complete their work independently and then the teacher can review the reports and use that information for the next class. They can toggle lessons on and off and customize things to the needs of their classroom.”

All of this means that educators will be able to remediate and advance students more quickly than ever before. This mastery gives students the sense of competency necessary to propel them forward on their learning journey. Cheating becomes much less appealing in this environment and AI becomes the tool for expansion that it was designed to be.