Just Now Possible

Inside eSpark’s AI Teacher Assistant: RAG, Evals, and Real Classroom Needs

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Guests:

  • Thom van der Doef, Principal Product Designer at eSpark
  • Mary [last name], Director of Learning Design & Product Manager at eSpark
  • Ray Lyons, VP of Product & Engineering at eSpark

    • Topics covered:

    • The origin story of Teacher Assistant: connecting administrator mandates with teacher needs
    • Why the team abandoned a chatbot interface in favor of a more structured workflow
    • How retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and embeddings shaped the product architecture
    • Lessons learned from debugging semantic search vs. keyword search
    • Building evals with rubrics, Braintrust, and a human-in-the-loop approach
    • What’s next for Teacher Assistant: more contextual recommendations using student data

      • Links & References:

      • eSpark Learning
      • Braintrust – evals and observability for LLM applications
      • AI Evals Course by Hamel Husain and Shreya Shanker (Get 35% off with my affiliate link)

        • Chapters:

        02:05 Overview of Epar's Adaptive Learning Program
        07:19 Challenges and Insights from COVID-19
        17:06 Developing the Teacher Assistant Feature
        24:55 User Experience and Interface Evolution
        34:29 Chat GPT-5's New Features
        35:16 Balancing Engagement and Efficiency
        35:40 Seasonal Business and Real Traffic
        36:29 Technical Decisions and RAG Implementation
        38:28 Challenges with Embeddings and Metadata
        41:24 Improving Recommendations and Data Enrichment
        55:18 Evaluating the Teaching Assistant
        01:05:51 Future Plans and User Feedback
        01:07:57 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

        ...more
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        Just Now PossibleBy Teresa Torres