In early October, Singapore-based edutech company Literatu announced that it is working to customise and integrate its AI-based writing solution to the country’s national online learning portal Student Learning Space (SLS)–accessible by all primary and secondary school teachers and students.

Called Scribo AI, the solution will help provide feedback on student’s writing in style, spelling and grammar. It aims to help teachers better focus on guiding students in the more complex aspects of language construction and develop higher-level language skills, such as creative expression and persuasion.

The solution will be integrated into the Language Feedback Assistant for English (LangFA-EL) tool and go live on SLS in December.

According to Literatu CEO Mark Stanley, Scribo sets itself apart by emphasising teaching and learning writing.

“Scribo recognises that to develop strong writing skills, students require a deeper connection to educators that provides timely feedback and personalised guidance. Research supports the hypothesis that students learning to write in English benefit from personalised guidance, feedback, and strategies for improvement,” he explains in an email to e27.

Stanley says Scribo is available to schools as a complete platform or API, but the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) implements Scribo as an API integrated with their SLS platform.

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He highlights the three areas that set Scribo apart from existing tools:

– Engagement in planning and scaffolding: “Scribo engages students in the crucial stage of planning and structuring their writing. It tailors its approach to each student’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), ensuring they are set up for success from the planning phase onward.”

– Comprehensive writing feedback: “Unlike standard GPS systems, Scribo goes beyond grammar and punctuation correction. It offers personalised feedback on vocabulary, sentence structure, tone, argument development, and more. This personalised feedback helps students enhance their writing skills within self-directed learning. Moreover, it informs teachers about recurring issues, enabling them to provide targeted guidance and remediation.”

– Transparent scoring and customisation: “Scribo uniquely scores student work and provides detailed explanations for the scores assigned. The engine can calibrate its assessment based on various factors such as genre, year level, and subject and is responsive to curriculum-specific marking criteria.”

“Furthermore, teachers can use their own rubrics, allowing AI to auto-grade and further personalise feedback. Scribo saves teachers valuable time by quickly identifying areas where students require additional assistance, eliminating the need to read and correct numerous essays manually,” Stanley says.

“This guidance on what students should focus on next is invaluable, as it elevates the mentorship role of teachers, giving them more quality time to provide the most impactful, human-cognitive advice.”

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Writing remains a highly relevant skill. This is how Scribo will help

Stanley explains that the idea for Scribo came from his own personal experience with his sons as they moved through school years.

“‘Stranded brilliance’ is a great term to describe the problem many students face where they can be great at some subjects and not so good at others. In our experience, writing was the stranded subject,” he says.

“Writing English well is the most difficult meta-cognitive skill for students to master. The assembly of clear thinking wrapped in many grammar construct rules needs to be developed with a lot of practice and feedback. Writing remains the most critical 21st-century skill that many people are not proficient in and will avoid, given the opportunity. This hesitation to write is indeed the big attraction of Generative AI and ChatGPT.”

This problem is further exacerbated by the workload teachers must go through, clashing with the pressing need for personalised student support. It eventually led to Literatu developing Scribo.

“A key determiner of the quality of any AI model depends on the quality of the inputs and data used in training and fine-tuning the model. Scribo’s K12 data corpus represents the student writing styles of many Southeast Asia (SEA)-based countries and students, many of which make up a diverse school population in most SEA countries. We work with Singapore MOE to curate and develop new levels of representative data to fine-tune the production models used by MOE,” Stanley explains.

“The ultimate litmus test for Scribo is ‘will it advise students with feedback in a way that an English teacher would?’. The closer the answer gets to a resounding ‘yes’, the more effective the platform is in helping teachers and students. We are getting really close.”

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Writing the future

Literatu is run by a core team of nine engineers and support staff who have been working together for over six years.

The company was bootstrapped until it closed a funding round in June by EduSpaze and Heritas Capital to get the corporate structure in place and be investor-ready as it expands.

It plans to raise a new funding round in early 2024.

Stanley shares that Literatu is looking forward to running pilot projects in the US and Canada and is opening new partnerships with publishers in new market segments in the UK and Latin America.

“We have expanded the level of AI and the practical use of AI in Scribo dramatically this year and will deliver these new features into live production later this year. There is so much more AI can help teachers and students with, and we are committed to delivering significant benefits,” Stanley closes.

“2024 will also see Scribo rolls across the MOE student and teacher base of some 500,000 users and large B2B2C deployments into two big SEA countries.”

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Image Credit: Literatu

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