Ed-You

Home page
School code page
Student feedback page with toxicity protection
Admin dashboard
Individual teacher evaluation page

Inspiration

We were inspired to create Ed-You because of personal experiences in our own education. Oftentimes, students feel they cannot give feedback or report on teachers for fear of retaliation. In more serious situations, the situation even became dangerous and mentally detrimental to the student. In order to combat this, we created an application that focuses on giving school administration secure and anonymous feedback from students.

What it does

Ed-You is a web application that creates a direct channel for secure feedback from students about teachers to administration. Ed-You is catered to two main audiences: students and administrators. Students enter their school code, which is randomly generated and available to the admin in their school, and are able to choose from a list of teachers at their school and provide anonymous feedback whenever they want. The only restriction to student-feedback is toxicity: the application uses a fine-tuned large language model to flag any potentially harmful comments and force the student to reword them. On the administration side, admins can log in through Google OAuth to access their dashboard. A list of teachers from their school will be visible, and admins can click on any teacher to learn more about the feedback given to them. This feedback takes the form of an average rating calculated by another fine-tuned LLM, an AI-generated summary, and raw comments with time stamps.

How we built it

Front-end: HTML, Bulma and CSS, Thymeleaf
Back-end: Java Spring
Machine-learning: -> 2 fine-tuned Cohere language models for ranking classification and toxicity classification -> 1 Cohere general language model for summarization
Other APIs: Google OAuth for authentication

Challenges we ran into

One main challenge we faced was only having two teammates. Therefore, we each had to take on a larger workload in order to still create a quality project. In addition to this, one of us was skilled in app development while the other was skilled in web development. As a result, deciding on which technologies to use was tough. We were able to overcome these challenges through working hard, adapting, and always being open to learning new things!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to fine-tune existing large-language models and successfully integrate them into the application. We were also proud that we created an entire working application that looks simple, smooth, and slick.

What we learned

Isha: This was my first time participating in web development, as I usually do app development, and I was able to learn very interesting and helpful technologies such as Bulma. I was also able to learn how to fine-tune large language models.

Erica: I tried many new web development frameworks and libraries through this project. Initially, I created an Express.js backend with PUG and Bulma, also incorporating Passport.js for authentication, none of which I had had previous experience with. Although we ended up switching to a Java Spring backend, I still learned a lot about these technologies.

After creating this project, we both learned numerous skills. Overall, creating Ed-You was a fun and very educational learning experience for both of us!

What's next for Ed-You

In the future, we hope to continue advancing Ed-You by adding many more features that allow administration to better analyze the teacher data. This can take the form of a bar graph displaying teacher rating overtime, and a word cloud that highlights the words that students use most often to describe a specific teacher. We also plan on implementing a feature in which, if students allow, teachers can look at the feedback they receive and therefore make improvements in their teaching or behavior.