Time AI for Schools
Time Management Done Differently
What is Time AI?
It is an artificial intelligence (AI) that manages appointments and meeting times without so much human coordination labor. There are many differences between regular intelligent calendaring applications and true AI to manage time, especially for schools and training. Time AI is different than mechanical intelligence in that it makes decisions usually given to humans to do through a calendar-setting interface. These are the three main areas of intelligence in time AI.
Common Time Decisions
With AI Appointments, time AI finds the nearest common date and hour for the requested amount of time between people and sets automatically. It can manage this for many people at once, setting for the highest percentage of respondents found or all of them within a specified period.
Meetings which Split into Multiple Dates & Manage Cohorts
With AI Meetings, one created meeting splits into many and waits to set for subsets of the participants spread across time. The AI sets the nearest common date for each set of participants called a cohort as they enroll by accepting the meeting. Each meeting has instructions issued with the invitation for the participants to follow before they enroll. The difference in time of enrollment causes some participants to be in early meetings, others in later meetings with a different set of fellow participants. This allows learning to be pace-based. Knowstory refers to these as “Meets” because that fits closely with “Class Meetings,” and sometimes calls them “AI Cohorting Meets.”
Schedule Flexibility Through Layered Levels
With AI, schedules can be bi-level. This means that the allocation of time to duties can be preconfigured but have “overrides” using a separate AI mechanism.
Level 1: A level one schedule provides each user with general hour-by-hour activity guidance. In schools this means to study math in hour one, language in hour two, and so forth for students. For teachers it means what hours they have and which classes.
Level 2: Users can bracket time and label it with a “hold” to tell the AI when to drop in what kind of appointments or meetings. A hold disregards the level one schedule and pretends the bracketed time is open time. A hold, or several of them, means a teacher can take all their math units and make one extended hold of all math unit classes for those schedule hours to operate as one. A second hold could be science units also being taught. Using a hold, the class meetings governed by the rate of cohort enrollment for the next class, have more open time to set. No conflicts will occur because the AI takes care of that. Students would still use their level one schedule to get their study time in but attend class meetings whenever they are calendared in holds.
Fractionalizing Time the foundation of changed schooling
The traditional concept of a class meeting is typically the teacher with a whole group of students for forty-five minutes to an hour or more on repeat several times a week for many weeks. The entire group moves together across time for each class.
Time AI proposes better efficiency by fractionalizing the time spent with a teacher to just the verbal instruction in active teaching. The remainder of the time students spend separately. That would typically be in a homeroom in a school with oversight, but the instructional minutes would remain the same — time spent with a teacher versus time spent studying separately in some other room are just added together to be equivalent to the same class time in old-style class schedules. Using time AI, the same class moment will now calendar multiple times for smaller cohorts ondemand, as they arrive at that point in the curriculum sequence, creating pace-based learning. The whole moving together in the same time series of classes goes away. This also means every teaching moment intends to have teachers with students for briefer periods, which is workable because there are fewer, and they are all at the same point rather than mixed-grade levels typical in today’s classrooms because some students may be behind or ahead of grade level but are placed by age into grades.
Note that once the class hour block is fractionalized, the number of students meeting with a teacher at once can also be fractionalized. Whole group classes become smaller cohorts who are, again, at the same point in the curriculum sequence, a major feature that unburdens teaching and learners themselves.
With two levels of fractionalization, the whole pattern of learning shifts to resemble something akin to students all studying in homerooms that appear more like airport waiting rooms before various flights appear on tracking boards and take students off to short or long classes. They fly back and disassemble to study some more before other flights to other destination classrooms, which are their other subjects with teachers in various aggregations of fellow students being cohorted together by time AI.
When schools also put each student at the right course level regardless of grade, the entire pattern can shift to adapt to the right level in every subject for every student.
Schooling Done Differently
Long-time educators may try to compare the restructuring of schooling through time AI as “like” other pace-based learning, competency-based learning, online learning, flipped learning, etc. Yet none of those models attempt to fractionalize the whole group as well as the amount of time for purposeful intersection with live teaching and course levels. Some digital courseware programs do cohort students into levels of reading or math, but not necessarily as groups to work together, just points where each student works in the programs.
In addition, online learning nearly always removes much of the live teaching. Only time AI allows a complete break from grade-by-age and whole group class structure across entire master schedules, while not sacrificing live teaching. Time AI also does not force the issue of competency for students to move to the next lesson because the decision is entirely on the teacher whether to restrict a student to a course step to restudy or release them to the next. It is also content agnostic.
Knowstory’s time AI delivers on much needed restructuring to both unburden teachers and provide the personalization so in demand by parents and students.
Uses teachers just for active moments of teaching. A major worry of schools is getting all the teachers needed for grade and subject coverage. By separating the classroom discipline during study moments and moving teachers around doing just the live instruction moments, they are no longer land-locked into whole groups hour-by-hour. This means they can spend the time savings when not in meetings delivering instruction roaming to visit individual students that digital dashboards show need special attention.
• Time AI gives teachers back roughly 50% of their time to do direct instruction as needed.
• Time AI allows easy substitutions and creates co-teaching opportunities easily.
• Time AI reduces the stress on teachers to personalize when students are several grades behind or ahead because every cohort is at the same point in study.
• Time AI allows schools to provide online learning courses without a separate structure. Students enrolled as online participants simply attend via video conference while the teacher is teaching the live class to any members of the cohort who are present in the teacher’s location.
• The distinction between being present physically or arriving via video conference for class meets by the teacher for any cohort is immaterial when the school provides paraprofessionals for oversight of the students physically present. This also means schools can develop a matrix of teachers who are not on campus while others are present. Districts can create fractional shared teaching resources across multiple schools.
Breaks whole groups into small groups called cohorts and lets them pace independently. A long-held dream of educational institutions has been to have some help in the logistics of managing smaller groups or individuals for their unique pace of learning — and leave the mass manufacturing line structure behind.
• With time AI in Knowstory, it’s here. Now all courses, any grade, any subject can be “uberized” to still intersect with live teaching. Time AI reduces the stress on teachers to personalize when students are several grades behind or ahead because every cohort is at the same point in study.
• Time AI allows students to be on any course at any grade level, solving the many problems of teachers trying to personalize learning outside the grade band of the courses they are teaching.
Creates course frames which cause the AI cohorting meetings to sequence together. A single lesson can use a “non-course frame” AI cohorting meeting. Any teacher can use this just for project-based learning alongside a regular schedule. These stand-alone AI cohorting meetings cause cohorts to meet at separate times on the calendar for the same single purpose broken into multi-meetings. Going beyond single meetings which break into cohorts, using a course frame tethers many class AI cohorting meets together into a sequence of:
Lesson 1 — resources study and then a class meet, Lesson 2 — resources study and then a class meet, all of a course’s lessons one after another. This allows a course to be paced faster or slower at any point. Any one course may see days or weeks of separation in firm calendared dates of the different cohorts for one lesson step. Cohorts will also “re-shuffle” because different students can go slower or faster at different resources study points.
• Through fractionalization of what is being done in any one moment of teaching and learning, and where it is being done in space, time AI sets up true pace-based learning.
• Course frames offer places to put in links to lessons built elsewhere, plus attachments and quizzes as needed with the instructions before the student clicks “Finish” to enroll in the subsequent class meet. Class meets also have links created to be put into outside systems if the student will be doing their study there and enrolling in each class meet through the link in the other system.
A 10-year-old 5th grader is working at the 7th grade level in two subjects, 4th grade in another, and 5th in
Absenteeism is solved in new ways. Since students can be placed at the right gradelevel of study in any subject irrespective of their age and pace independently, they get a personalized learning path. Feeling marginalized because they are placed by age into a grade that they are very far behind, is no longer a factor. In addition, being absent means they don’t progress but also do not miss anything. They can catch up by putting in more time to reach the next live teaching moment class meet. Since students are pacing independently without the constraint of grade-by-age, some of their same-aged peers may be well ahead in some subjects while behind in other subjects. In this way, the entire system can be portrayed as “gamified,” and courses seen as “levels,” which create student agency. Even within a course, the faster moving cohort helps incentivize a new social dynamic of small groups staying together or trying to get into a different cohort intentionally to be with friends. In addition, students can be “doubled up” for time spent on any one subject easily, giving up electives and extra-curricular courses to get to grade-level work they should be in. Conversely, very fast students already ahead of grade level can move forward to higher grade courses and be given more electives.
another.
• Time AI creates student agency by gamifying the entire learning environment, bringing it into sync with the mindset of the present generation.
Makes socialization intentional, not a by-product. Since a restructuring to separate live teaching from study periods would put students most of the time in large groups of quiet study, schools can form social activity in homerooms or online groups to deliberately create socialization.
• Time AI helps schools reduce schooling hecticness and lack of human connection by establishing an anchoring space with a homeroom. Setting up a home-like study environment and separately using classrooms for precise active teaching moments also provides the same environment as most major industries with work-from-home or office space for employees and separate group meeting spaces.
• Time AI allows schools to establish house leaders, individual general practitioners who may be certified or well-trained paraprofessionals, to work in concert with specific subject teachers. This is similar to the healthcare industry with general practitioner doctors and an array of specialists. In addition, those specialist subject teachers can be anywhere, coming in via video conferencing meetings for teaching. This allows schools to have fractional labor shared with other schools. The subject teacher may be live on-campus in one location but shared over the internet with other locations.
A Teacher’s Day
Teachers are willing to pivot to using time AI once they understand what it does for them.
Yes, a move away from traditional block schedules where a teacher can know they are in the same place hour-by-hour and has all of one class together every day at the same time, to a system of meetings which are a more randomized pattern of points in the curriculum, is a major difference. It is normal for administrators and executives in most other professions, however.
The gains:
Time savings of up to fifty percent, depending on number of units a teacher carries. Saved time is now “open” for roaming, planning, managing and tracking individual students.
Every meeting is a cohort of students who are at the same point in the curriculum. This alone is major for teachers since they are not facing a whole group with between fifteen and forty percent behind or ahead in grade level.
Accomodations for special needs and foreign language students is much simpler because cohorts are smaller and those students can get direct instructional help during the teacher’s roaming time.
Less class management and discipline because AI manages cohorts and discipline is mostly managed by homeroom leaders. Students are on an individualized set of courses and are socialized in homerooms. It will be expected that meetings are purposeful moments to have active engagement.
Teachers would need to check their calendars and manage tracking panels all day, every day they are on duty. They may not even have the same classroom for each meeting.
The teacher may be in one of several locations during any one day, primarily in classrooms, roaming to do direct instruction and check-ins, or in an office doing planning and tracking student progress to manage the time schedules of individual students. In this example, any part of those three courses could show up on any one day with cohorts landing on the calendar needing that class moment. The teacher may also be carrying multiple units of the same courses.
Every meeting would give the teacher a short reminder of what to teach with verbal instruction of some kind for that moment before they step in to meet that cohort. Time AI may put two or more of the same class moment on one day based on cohort pace. This is really not much different than teachers doing the same thing within a regular class hour for several small groups, or their regular class hour across several days. It is just managed now by AI.
This one-day example is one subject across multiple courses and possibly multi-grades. Each color represents a different course. Notice how some meetings are shorter and others longer. Some meetings say they are just “check-ins.” A check-in would normally be done in homerooms with the teacher roaming to individual students and checking understanding only, not a formal instructional moment.
This example day uses:
3:55 hours of live class meetings, all small cohorts who are at the same point in one of three different courses being taught by this teacher
2:05 hours of calendared check-ins and roaming to do direct instruction as needed
Total: 6 hours of live teaching
The remaining part of an 8-hour workday would be grading, breaks or prepping.
Schedules will vary teacher-to-teacher and will be dependent on the school’s master schedule.
Implementation
Knowstory’s time AI is built within a social ecosystem. This design allows for growth from simple calendaring intelligence to the use of paid groups and full master scheduling options around course frames. Because of the social structure, the interface is more learnercentric than typical learning management systems which are built to be teacher-centric. In Knowstory, student’s affiliated can keep their records for life to share with higher ed institutions and employers.
Knowstory is also built with “One-Teacher-School” group creation for teachers who do not have a school or district paying for full implementation. This allows teachers to use time AI for just their own courses or project-based learning. It also allows teachers to offer gig services as a substitute or tutor, to fractionalize their labor. Any teacher can create courses and also offer them in the featured products marketplace.
Companies with groups and products in the marketplace can offer their calendars for scheduling demos and sales conversations. Any product can be added to an individual, school or district account’s “invenstory.” This helps manage licensing and renewals. Upgrades to both the marketplace and invenstory are forthcoming to allow for direct purchase, product management, license distribution, and integration into educator and learner use.
Requirements of Implementation
1. Plan of Action. Whatever level of implementation is anticipated whether for a single teacher or sub-set of teachers, whole school or whole district, there are decisions to be made with regard to:
o Analysis. What are the pain points attempting to be solved? What are the tertiary effects of shift?
n Most common pain points cited are:
• Unburden teachers by fractionalizing their time and using them most efficiently.
• Enable professional development to be pace-based but still intersected with live trainers for moments when small groups are together.
• Collapse online programs with live classroom teaching to save money and needed numbers of teachers.
• Allow alternative programs to have very flexible schedules for students who work, special needs, etc.
• Allow alternative programs that service widely divergent grade bands to provide right-level courses that the AI will still intersect with live teaching even if there is only one student in a course or a few.
o Winning over teachers. Time AI is very different than a normal linear schedule for a teacher, long blocks of time with some non-classroom time in any single day. Being professionally on-demand for any part of a course at any time is very different. See info on “A Teacher’s Day” on page 6 & 7.
o What schedule will be used. Will a full transition be made to bi-level calendars with collapsed units for teachers or will it just be the altered use of flex time? If an individual teacher, what time will need to be put into a “hold” to schedule AI cohorting meetings and for what course or project?
o Subjects. Will the time AI be used for core subjects, just electives, or just supplemental and remedial subjects?
o Timeline. What is the timeline for implementation and how much preparatory advance work is needed on courses and schedule?
o Building courses. Will the time AI just loosely frame each course that already exists in another system? Do courses even need course frames, or will non-course frame meetings work because AI cohorting is only applied to projects overlaying regularly scheduled courses?
o Space use. What space rearrangement is appropriate to implementation?
o Hardware and networks. Will there need to be digital signage? Does the school need a network upgrade to manage new traffic?
o Software model architecture. What systems, courseware, and discrete digital or paper resources will be in play? How will these mesh and how will teachers and students access them?
o Training. What training will be needed to ensure all participants understand how to use time AI?
o Public relations. What communication should go to the public about the shift to use time AI? What are the appeals for students, parents, teachers? How should communications be staged?
o Ongoing oversight and reporting. How is it going and what are the results?
Study Time
Issue Resources & Assignments
Study time is when students are doing the work assigned with any resources independently. They could be working singly or in pairs quietly, from anywhere. This time would optimally be spent in a space separately from the teacher with another adult having oversight and calling in the teacher as needed — or the teacher roams doing informal instruction but can proceed at any time to manage another Meeting.
When teachers are not doing formal or informal instruction, they can:
1. Plan and issue additional personalizations
2. Adjust individual student time spent on which subjects
Formal Instruction
Set a Meeting
Formal instruction is time spent delivering verbally to a group. It is usually lecture, presentation, hands-on project time such as a lab, or discussion-style. It’s anytime you are verbalizing knowledge and giving guidance formally.
Difference from 5-Day Week of 45-minute Classes:
Now that the whole group is divided into cohorts, to keep your calendaring optimum, the lessons each week of formal instruction time should be up to two :30-minute or less meetings a week to accommodate multiple cohorts, one :45-minute meeting, and the other two days check-ins only for students. Every week of a course should be planned so that cohorts may pace independently and rearrange members as some pace faster or slower at any given time.
Informal Instruction
Roaming Time & Check-ins
Roaming to do individual instruction, subject understanding check-ins and motivation. No calendaring is necessary for check-ins and can be done by watching tracking of students across a course — paying attention to individual students as needed for instruction or motivation by roaming to them. This time toggles between the spaces for formal instruction meetings, and purely study time spent in homerooms or remotely with other adult oversight or a rotation of teachers.
Homerooms where students are studying should have “quiet zones” for study and corners for teachers to meet with students informally.
2. Divided Instruction. One-Teacher-School educators or school and district educator groups must devise a plan for any pilot set of teachers or whole schools to split formal versus informal teaching and study time.
o Note: Learning Counsel’s August 2024 national teacher survey indicated that these percentages of teachers cited these percentages of time they use vocalizing instruction in front of whole groups with the remainder of time having students in independent or small group study.
n 9% cite less than 10% of time
n 31% cite less than 30% of time
n 37% cite less than 50% of time
n 18% cite less than 75% of time
n 5% did not know
Variations in response were attributed by analysts to primarily what grade and what subject. Some subjects lend themselves to more lecturing, and some grades use less whole-group instruction, particularly primary grades. Analysts found that giving guidance to all teachers for amounts of time used in small group instruction allowed teachers to reduce the teaching moment’s length of lecture because of smaller groups who would be uniformly at the same point. Being smaller groups each time also saved on question time. In addition, the higher-lecture-time teachers could pre-record some of their lectures to be added to the study-time side with class meetings then used only for questions. In all, the computations showed that subjects tended to even each other out for amounts of time used because this guidance would vary up or down depending on subject:
Each single week’s plan of five lessons are optimized for time AI in these parameters:
3 Class Days + 2 No-Class Days Per Week, any Subject
One :45-minute class meeting (used for longer lectures, labs, etc.)
Two :20-minute up to :30-minute classes for shorter vocalized instruction.
Two no class scheduled days which are used for check-in for every student and the teacher does direct instruction as needed by visiting students individually in homerooms and using set-aside homeroom corners for discussions, office space, or another classroom. Teachers may decide to pair students to work, take a few aside that are all at the same place in their courses and not moving quickly through, etc.
Teachers can create many variations of this and also think in longer cycles like several weeks at a time for how they plan a course’s study time and class meets.
One Week Example:
A single week’s plan of five lessons that tries to set a lecture of :45-minutes every day will “pack up the calendar” because each cohort is smaller than the whole group and each will set their :45-minute lesson for all five lessons. Soon cohort number two and beyond are waiting months for their next class. The only way to make it so that this does not happen is to have the teacher open for three more hours a day over the usual one period so that every class can be :45 minutes long but with small cohorts. There is a lot of inefficiency in doing it that way, and probably a lot of wasted time within each “class.”
3. Courses Built. Since students will be pacing individually and the time AI will take care of cohorting them as they move through to intersect each cohort with each live teaching moment, implementation must consider:
a. Enough at start. For faster students, course progress may take them many weeks ahead in little time. Courses should be built out for at least three months of lessons and class meets prior to any student starting, and thereafter continue to be built forward to the end.
b. Optimum is 4 courses per subject per grade. The optimum set-up is 9-weeks for each course with 27 classes total — equivalent to 3 classes per week with other days planned as roaming to do check-ins and direct instruction. Two courses are then equivalent to a single semester course. Four courses are a year’s worth in any one subject. Dividing into four creates greater agency for students to complete and get to the next in just over two months. Students can also be placed into any one course and start at any time. This visual is for planning. Students could greatly vary for which course and which step.
c. Every level. Since the ideal scene of time AI schooling is to place every student in every subject at their unique level, regardless of grade, every level of course that will be needed should be started.
d. Testing. Figuring out prior to implementation launch what each student needs for courses is important, although a sub-set of students who are all at the same grade-level in the subjects that will transition may be the pilot group chosen.
4. Total Time. Course frames allow teachers to watch progress and know if a student is ahead or behind normal progress. What is normal is entirely the adjudication of the course maker for how much time each study moment plus the time of the class meeting attached after the study should take. There may be an assignment to study some resources that should take about one hour. That one hour would be added to the attached class
meeting of :30 minutes for a total of 1:30 minutes for that one lesson. Each lesson total would be added to a whole-course total and divided by the number of days the course is designed to take. Students ahead or behind are evaluated against the daily median. Teachers can decide if that median is “true” and behind students should get extra attention, or if they see it really does take more time on certain lessons and less on others, to leave students to progress without interruption.
5. Bi-Level Schedules. While individual teachers can just use holds to collapse their units to use time AI, this sometimes will not work because of overlaps with other teachers not using time AI. Schools will need to consider their overall master schedule to be able to give teacher and student schedules. “Bi-level” means there is an overall schedule, and everyone has an individual schedule hour-by-hour, but “holds” allow for individual flexibility.
6. Staffing. How will the school staff homerooms? Will there need to be multiple homerooms, each with a main “house leader” and a relief person so that the leader gets breaks and lunch? Which units will teachers carry and how will each of their “holds” work?
7. Collaboration. Plan for ongoing teacher collaboration to be scheduled so that students can have adjustments for how much time they spend on any one course if they get well behind, taking time away from other courses through teacher agreements as needed.
The Evolution of the Schooling Structure
What does the future of schooling really look like?
It doesn’t make sense that schools will remain the mass-manufacturing model of over two centuries ago. What does make sense is that the form of schooling will follow present age function. If you recall the reference, “Form follows function. It is the law.” (Reference: thelearningcounsel.com/articles/the-future-ofschools-because-of-the-internet)
The function present in all industries today is the use of the internet for communications and computing. The form of the internet is a distributed mesh network. It is omni-directional and instantaneous. Its function has already vastly modified the form of retail, healthcare, insurance, transportation and other industries away from centralized and pyramidical bureaucracies. All of them operate with a digital hub and organize distributed workflow to human workers cross numerous locations. This is a vast logistical change. Meanwhile, the model of schooling has only bifurcated to two modalities: always on-campus with live human teaching or online with little or no human teaching. It has remained relatively the same in structure. Time AI changes that, collapsing both the physical world of teaching and learning with the online world into one mesh exchange network.
Time AI can operate at five levels.
1. The first is just to add time AI calendaring into an individual’s or institution’s use for bookings links and request undated appointments using AI.
2. The second is to use time AI in the classroom for pace-based cohorting for primarily project-based learning and possibly cross-curricular learning by cohorts. At this level no major changes need to be made to the technology model architecture.
3. The third level does require a shift in the technology model architecture of software, hardware and networks. It’s the level of school scheduled flex time where part of a school day is offered as flex time so that any subject’s auto-cohorted meeting times are not confined to just the one-hour usual during the day for that subject’s class. Instead, the AI meets use both that time and flex time. Other elements put into flex time include remedial learning and electives.
4. The fourth level of using time AI is to move the entirety of schedules and space use into the Hi-Flex schooling model. In this model scenario, space use changes to use homerooms for every grade or multiple grades with classrooms now used as meeting spaces only. These are modified so that any teacher can use them, or in the case of lab environments, dedicated to one subject. The Hi-Flex model also changes to use the bi-level master schedules to create maximum flexibility for both teachers and students.
5. The fifth level is whole education sector Hi-Flex where, because of time AI and a centralized hub site, the interchangeability of teachers, freelance (gig) teachers, tutors, and other experts becomes easy to do so that learning pathways are potentially infinitely customizable. Sector Hi-Flex creates vast efficiencies and will accelerate specialization of teaching in new ways, driving more jobs and creating a market pricing dynamic for advanced expertise.
Sector Hi-Flex using time AI also has the capacity to move schools as local learning pathway crafters that source teaching intersection and fellow students from anywhere for fully customizable learning paths.
The Case for Transformation
Mass-Manufacturing Model
Whole Group Batches
SCIENCE
Time AI Flex Learning
Individualized & Small Batch Cohorts
Key benefits of time AI:
• Unburden teachers
• Remove the inequity of non-homogeneous learning levels through assignment to grades and courses by age
• Provide personalization of pace fit to learning level
• Better testing outcomes through assessment by course level roughly aligned to any grade rather than age
• Remove problems of absenteeism by giving student’s pace agency
• Improved social dynamics through intentionality in homerooms
• Reduced cost of execution
• Time-factor added as an analysis point to outcomes
• Ability to collapse online programs into campus programs
• Ability to reverse consolidation and move to “retail-like” small school distribution into neighborhoods, making education “walkable”
• Elevating teaching expertise while also extending it across greater numbers of students and geographies
• Shifting brand to learner-centric experience when every class meet is something to work toward and look forward to
• School administration becomes the work of sourcing a dynamic mix of teaching expertise and leading those teachers to provide the most engaging live moments for both on-campus and online attendees every time
• Built courses can be resold through the marketplace in a copy-over of the entire course framing of each lesson step with attached auto-cohorting AI meeting for other teachers and institutions to use, including curriculum resources links to purchase separately if they are copyrighted or require separate subscription
MATH LANGUAGE
The Future is a New Form
The present state of traditional schooling is rife with problems of physical and emotional discipline, disrupted homogeneity due to the large influx of foreign language students that teachers accommodate, a wide disparity in learning levels so that teachers are faced with teaching one grade’s subject to whole groups comprised of forty percent or more students who are not anywhere close to that grade level with prior required knowledge. That issue makes moving whole groups towards common testing dates as one unit almost impossible. Thousands if not millions of students are left behind despite attempts to provide remedial supports around the current model.
These factors, and more, indicate that innovating schooling is no longer a matter of shifting teaching method, which curriculum resource, what school theme or focus. It’s not even school model as online or on-campus, traditional public, charter or private. It’s the structure’s form
“Some people say give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.’
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them…Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
– Steve Jobs/Apple
The cascading failure of traditional schools with both high absenteeism and mass attrition to homeschool or any alternative, public or private or online, is so high that it has triggered a coincident push for vouchers and school choice. The speed of legislative change to allow vouchers that will subsume as much as forty percent of the entire sector’s spend in a few short years, has caused analysts to conclude that the real trend is away from the formal traditional structure — not just disagreements with curriculum, safety and security fears, poor teaching, or any other typical thing the public may point at. While consumers might not know it because they have never experienced it, they are seeking a new form of schooling. A form that doesn’t give up live teaching but provides it with precision. A form that puts everyone at their ideal level in all subjects. A form that can customize infinitely. A form that can create social community but not require only massive, centralized buildings reached by long bus rides. A form that can almost return to the homey feel of the one-room schoolhouse but still have sports teams and elective variety.
Time AI has the promise of keeping all that is best of the old form of schooling, especially human teaching, while giving vastly more efficiency and intangibles like social dynamics and flexible time and space use.
More about How Time AI Works
More About AI Cohorting Meets
• An AI cohorting meeting is a floating request that has been given an amount of time to be used. Once made, it awaits self-setting based on enrollment/acceptance by invited participants. In schools each class meeting that had a firm date on the calendar for when a teacher would deliver a lesson in the sequence of their course becomes the same class meeting delivered to each cohort in multiple instances spread across time. This concept is the foundation of pace-based course structure of schooling that “uberizes” the live teaching moment but does not change teaching methods.
• Meets sub-divide by the total number of participants invited by a cohort value given, setting each date and time for each cohort until all participants are completed across hours, days, weeks or months. The meet may set hundreds of times. Meeting invitations allow the creator to issue instructions to complete in advance of the invited participant accepting calendaring. Varying times of participants completing the instructions and enrolling in the meeting is what the AI watches to accrue participants into cohorts.
• Currently the time AI uses user input to set cohort value for each meeting. Version 2 of the AI will automatically choose the cohort value given other factors and do so dynamically.
• Version 1 of the time AI decides how near to present time and how far out on calendars to find coordinated time for any one cohort added as a participant in a meet. Version 2 will allow users to give a starting interval for when the AI starts seeking time after the last person joins a cohort and also how far out the AI will look to book that cohort.
• AI cohorting meets, once released, will stay operational forever so that even after they have completed all participants, the user that made the meeting can add more participants who will then experience the coordinated calendaring by cohort with those instructions. This is for two reasons:
1. Trainers or teachers adding more students cannot duplicate ones who have already completed the meet.
2. The meet with instructions doesn’t have to be reconstructed.
3. A meet that is part of a course frame with several meets in steps of study in sequence remain open so that the course is always open for new enrollment at any time. All timers and targets are running in the background to reengage as new participants are added to give them targets and calendar them for their clasws meetings.
• AI meets run on timers from an initial target and interval-to-next-target of the originating user. A target is not the firm date and time, but a guide to the AI to move an incomplete cohort along by setting coordinated date and time when there are not enough remaining participants to fill the original cohort value. In version 1, this is set by the user. In version 2, this will be set by the AI because additional calculations observing both teachers’ schedule and how fast or slow students have moved through in the past will become part of dynamic adjustments.
• Participants can apply a “push-forward” mechanism to any AI meetings and some AI bookings. This function deletes the participant from that instance set to the calendar but not the meeting. The AI will seek to reset that participant in a future date and time. This is a vast improvement in trying to manually reschedule between people.
• At the live calendared meeting, the creating user can “push-forward” any participant who didn’t arrive for the AI to re-cohort into another instance of the calendaring. This mechanism is also the attendance-taking mechanism. Anyone not pushed forward is assumed to have actually attended.
• Meet creators can tell the AI to accept more participants above the cohort value if they enroll before the already-set next meet that had a full cohort.
• Meeting creators can tell the AI to never set a meet that goes below cohort value as a time savings mechanism for the creator. For example, a meeting set by six participants who enrolled may have one of them opt out before the meeting has a chance to happen by using the “push-forward” button because they were sick that day. If the cohort value was six, it is now at five participants. If this “push-forward” opt out by the sixth participant were within parameters of time that allow the whole meeting to be canceled and reset without great inconvenience to the creator and participants, that’s what the AI would do. It would delete the meet of all remaining five participants’ and the creator’s schedule and await a new sixth participant.
About the “Hold”
the foundation of bi-level schedules
• Bracketed open time for any user can be applied to give the AI a narrower band of when to set coordinated appointments meetings. These are called “holds,” and are labeled things like “Math Classes,” “Demo calls,” “Parent-Teacher Conferences,” and the like. Holds can have minus-times inside them to account for things like lunch and other breaks so that no appointments set over these minus-times. Participants can apply holds to any AI appointments or meetings.
Users designate what bracketed time, in what days of the week, they will accept an appointment or meeting.
Example: Students
o Holds can give added time options for class meetings. In schooling, students can be given an assigned schedule for which hours and on which courses so that they routinely spend the right amounts of time studying each course, hour by hour. A hold allows them to add to any normal class time with other open time for class meetings to drop into. This added time might be the school’s “flex time,” a large block of time in the morning or at the end of the school day. This allows a student to seek to accelerate or do remedial in any one subject as needed.
o Holds can collapse every course’s study time into one block. A student can use their regular hour-by-hour study schedule as merely a target total amount of time to spend on each subject and use more or less time to complete the work needed to enroll in that subject’s next class meeting. They would designate all study hours for all subject class meetings. In their daily study they may complete their math work very quickly and move on to their history work, for
example, where they may spend well more than the hour designated. If they are particularly fast in most subjects, they would “save” time up to use in an elective. Students may also opt to concentrate a lot of time on a subject in which they are way behind by working on it exclusively. AI tracking panels would tell teachers, the makers of the auto-cohorting class meets, who was running behind so that they could investigate.
Example: Teachers, Trainers
o Holds can collapse every unit or course a teacher carries into one block. Teachers or trainers who teach many units, possibly across multiple grades, can take the regular time schedule of hour-by-hour assigned time for each class and collapse all into one large hold minus breaks. The AI will set meetings for any course’s classes at any open time it finds. This would look like this:
8:00-8:55 a.m.
5-minute break
9:00-9:55 a.m.
5-minute break
10:00-10:55 a.m. 5-minute break
11:00-11:55 a.m. 5-minute break
6th Grade Math Course 3
7th Grade Math Course 4
7th Grade Math Course 3
6th Grade Math Course 1
12:00-1:00 p.m. Lunch & Prep
1:00-1:55 p.m. 5-minute break
2:00-3:00 p.m.
7th Grade Math Course 2
6th Grade Math Course 2
All units, any class meeting with full cohort sets in any time minus the breaks and lunch
Start: 8:00-3:00 p.m. - minus 8:55-9:00 a.m. break - minus 9:55-10:00 a.m. break - minus 11:55-1:00 p.m. break & lunch & prep time - minus 1:55-2:00 p.m. break
Questions & Answers
Who is doing this already? You will notice if you create an account that there are already thousands of users and a lot of Groups and products in the marketplace. All schools and districts listed in the federal database have groups to “claim.” This is intentional and for security reasons. If you’d like to see school accounts that are presently using the site, we do have permission to do live demos to show you.
Will the AI create content for the teacher or students? No, at least not yet until types of AI converge. This is a different kind of AI focused on time management with intelligence. The content you have only needs a course frame built in Knowstory so that how you use time and spaces can shift.
How do I get started? The Knowstory site has free levels for every type of user: educator, learner and company representative. It has a social media base with each Group being a walled garden account that can be open or closed. Each group has various roles for members and each role has different accesses. Only paid groups can access the full time AI master schedule creator, create course frames, and use the advanced tracking.
How long does it take to implement? We suggest a year if your school will be involving several teachers or the entire school. This is primarily to run a parallel schedule the first year and build a broad enough course/ class meets map.
How can a school or district leader get started? We recommend an initial consulting agreement to create a plan and provide a report for the consumption of all stakeholders. Part of the consulting may involve a live professional development exersize on site so that your school can experience the difference in movement and flow of learning.
How do we know parents and students even want this or would agree to it? We know that homeschooling is growing at 51-65% year-over-year and that traditional schools are experiencing massive attrition and an absenteeism rate of 20% or higher. We also know that twenty States have some form of vouchers and school choice – their response to screams for change. Nine more States have school choice on the ballot for November 2024. States have moved with great urgency in only a few years. What parents and students want primarily is a quality education, which time AI enables by virtue of a structure shift to individually paced learning courses for any grade or level attained for any age without regard to grade. Some parents and many educators may say that students will not have enough self-determinism, or agency, to do the work or would try to game the system and just enroll in the next class meeting in subjects without having done the work. This is where teacher adjudication comes in. K12 schools have made major national news with students graduated who “can’t read,” indicating that, indeed, some students may have to be pushed through despite not learning if that is the will of the institution to make graduation rates. Or, an institution together with parents and students may find the novelty of having their own agency enough to accelerate if the institution is also offering electives for the saved time of moving through quickly. There are many innovative ways to craft the appeal of the shift.
What do other school leaders say is their number one reason for wanting to use time AI? They want to save their teachers. This is said over and over again by leaders who care about teachers.
Can I post news or have a school or company news “channel” alongside the calendaring people come to the Knowstory site to create? Yes, and more news channels are joining the public portions of the site, but most schools do not allow their news content into the public pool. The social aspects including bookmarking, all the State academic standards, the Invenstory function and marketplace are all parts of the larger vision to give schools more easy course building, management, the ability to sell courses, purchase content, and have the entirety of the time AI offered at low cost through the larger community and transactions as those functions are built out and relieve the need for charging. Individual learner accounts will always be free.