The study
The Community Learning and Service Partnership (CLASP) at Cornell University, recipient of the 2023 Malcolm Knowles Award, wanted an outside perspective on an in-house film. The authors turned to Evidano as a third party because they felt too close to the program to see it clearly, choosing it after finding no reports of the problems commonly associated with AI, such as bias and hallucinations.
The data was a film transcript carrying the voices of four groups: administrators and managers, employees and adult learners, union leaders, and students.
Human experts concurred
Expert educators viewed the same film at the AAACE conference in Lexington, Kentucky. The published paper reports that the tool rendered what a human might consider confirmation of the program’s aims, and concludes that artificial and human intelligence would agree on the determination it reached. The attendees added what the AI could not, suggesting earlier explanation of the learning partnerships and more on the program’s history.
How Evidano fit the workflow
- 1The film transcript was uploaded into Evidano.
- 2It was prompted to summarize the perspectives of each participant group, producing a clear synopsis for all four roles.
- 3A thematic analysis was run, and Evidano surfaced eight prominent themes, including motivation, engagement, personal growth, mutual learning, and lifelong learning.
“We identified one for which we could find no reports of the problems commonly associated with AI, such as bias and hallucinations.”
“In short, a machine data analytics tool, one so far without reports of the problems often associated with artificial intelligence tools, rendered what a human might consider to be confirmation of the program's aims.”
“It seems artificial and human intelligence would agree on the determination AILYZE reached in concluding its media analysis of the film.”
Evidano was named in the paper, cited with its URL, and its outputs attributed directly.
The authors learned of the tool through colleagues in evaluation who lauded it.
The full paper is freely available through ERIC, the U.S. Department of Education’s research database.