Cillian Ó Fathaigh’s friends still make fun of him for his claim to fame – selling his Leaving Cert notes for €3,000 on eBay in 2010.
A year-long “secrets of my success” series of Leaving Cert advice articles for The Irish Times followed, coaching readers on how to study for different subjects. It may resemble an early draft of Ó Fathaigh’s new venture – an AI tool called Pulc that he hopes will render grind schools around Ireland obsolete.
“Education is something that has just been part of everything I’ve done for the last 15 years in different forms,” says Ó Fathaigh, now an assistant professor in philosophy.
“The Irish second-level education is something I’ve been interested in for a long time and all the more in the last few years as things get a lot more unequal.”
The idea is straightforward. A student or teacher uploads work to Pulc and the software corrects it, providing feedback in the style of a Leaving Cert marker. From the teacher’s side, they can add, edit or remove any of Pulc’s comments. It does not produce work on a student’s behalf, and it aims to ease the burden of correcting papers on teachers.
“[The teacher] is reading the essay,” Ó Fathaigh says. “The time-consuming part is giving the feedback. What this does is generate the feedback, and then the teacher has full control over editing it, deleting it, approving it and adding their own feedback. It’s all sent back through the system as well.
“It’s not trying to replace teachers. You’re not going to be able, in spite of what the AI fanatics say, to replace the mastery and the creativity and the inspirational function of a teacher ...
“It’s asking how can we make you have more time to go off and do some teaching or not be correcting things at midnight – and it’s giving students more feedback because it can just produce much more. The teacher might say ‘I like that comment’, or ‘I don’t like that comment’, but it takes half a second to do that as opposed to a teacher having to write it out.”
About 500 teachers are using Pulc, which Ó Fathaigh began building full-time in January alongside his friend Charles Dillon, a mathematician and quantitative trader. The pair launched a prototype in March and are targeting September for a full roll-out. They believe it will be possible for Pulc to operate as Gaeilge across all subjects, allaying broad concerns that educational AI tools will disadvantage students in Gaelscoileanna.
Ó Fathaigh is an academic whose work centres around philosophy. He earned his master’s and PhD at Cambridge and is a Marie Curie fellow in Poland. Having experienced AI disruption in his own classroom at King’s College London last year, he understands the issues with students at various levels using unauthorised AI tools in their work.
Nonetheless, the use of AI in school work raises vexing ethical questions.
While concern over the potential for cheating among Leaving Cert candidates has been aired over recent weeks, is it really fair to use AI to grade essays when students are prohibited from using AI to write them? Teachers are grappling with these dilemmas amid claims from developments that AI will “transform”, “personalise” and “accelerate” learning.
In developing Pulc, Ó Fathaigh says he closely examined the current Irish syllabus – comparing it to his own time at second level and noting the parts of the course that essentially remain as they were. Elements of Irish education, he believes, are vulnerable to AI in the same way that they are vulnerable to grind schools. Accounting for it and changing things is complicated.
“I think it’s quite appropriate that education moves slowly, especially with things like technology but just in general as well,” he says. “I think what was perhaps most interesting to me, and we’ve seen this with the growth of grind schools, is that the bits that are particularly good for training for the exam or the bits that give people an edge – that rote learning problem remains present throughout it.”
Pulc has no business model, as Ó Fathaigh and Dillon say the focus has been on building something useful. “I’d hope maybe the Department of Education might be able to fund us in some way,” Ó Fathaigh says. “If it was the case that we had to find some way to make costs work, we could probably look at a couple of different models. You could go with a premium model; you could go with maybe advertisements.
“What I would want to commit to is that the goal would be to keep it free for teachers and schools and keep it free for any students that needed it or [at least offer] the core functionalities that we’re offering now.”
Kathleen Brady is a teacher at Naas Community College and a digital literacy tutor with Oide, where she helps run introductory courses on AI and showcase tools to teachers. Brady has been introducing Pulc to her students for about a month, finding it particularly useful over the Easter break when students often anxiously contact her for advice on their essays.
“Rather than emailing me three times a day, it might be nice to test it in there and see what it’s like,” she says. “It’s been really reliable so far. Nothing’s perfect but neither am I – nobody is, nor is any tool. I got them to feed in essays that I had previously marked to see whether it was close with its suggestion. Pulc was a little bit lower than what I had marked, which is good – there’s no harm in that.”
Brady hopes tools like Pulc can encourage sceptical teachers to be more open to AI, given “it is here, and we do need to accept it and work out how we’re going to harness it in a way that works.”
“It should lessen some of the menial tasks that we have to do,” she says. “I don’t mean the lesson planning per se. I enjoy lesson planning, and you need to lesson plan. You know your students best and that’s really important. This fear that they’re all going to hand in AI stuff, and we won’t know – you know how your student writes, you really do.
“I would hope that AI takes away some of the really menial tasks I have to do and gets me back to proper teaching. Maybe focus on some of the pastoral care stuff a little bit more as well, which can be really difficult to find time to do when you’re correcting 28 essays every two weeks.”
Alan Smeaton is a professor of computing at DCU and a member of the government’s AI Advisory Council. The council has been pushing for a wider conversation around AI in education and a greater focus to be placed on technology as a means of tackling inequality.
AI Lesson Assistant (Aila) is a tool developed by the Oak National Academy and funded by the UK government. As the name suggests, it provides resources for teachers to develop lesson plans. Already adopted by over 30,000 users, Smeaton points to Aila’s early success as an example of AI that helps teachers without diminishing their role.
“The teacher on a Sunday night generating lesson plans using a model and a system which has been trained on the curriculum and on the syllabus ... Much better than going to ChatGPT where you’ll get any kind of thing,” he says.
“When it’s focused and when it’s trained on the syllabus, in this case in the UK, you get great output and great productivity. So, there’s two examples, Pulc and Aila. These now are showing that it’s more than just the cheap or free version accessible to every student and every person with a smartphone.”
