FAQs
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Getting started
How do I sign up for Aila?
You can sign up to access Aila and our other AI experiments here.
How much does it cost to use Aila?
As with all of Oak's resources, Aila is completely free to use. There are some fair use limits that we have applied that you may reach if your use appears to be excessive.
What are the system requirements for using Aila?
We aim to make our resources as accessible as possible. Aila will be available to any teacher with access to a laptop or computer and the Internet. We currently don't support mobile usage.
What is a beta product?
Aila is in the beta phase, and we are still actively testing and developing Aila. This phase helps identify issues by allowing teachers to use the Aila in real-life conditions. Aila is not perfect, and will make some mistakes! Your feedback is essential to refine and improve Aila.
Is there a tutorial or guide available to help me get started?
Aila provides helpful tips and prompts for getting started. If you need additional support, you can take a look at our help section, or contact us.
Features and functionality
What features does Aila offer?
Aila offers a range of features to help teachers create high-quality lesson plans and resources. It is designed to ensure that lesson plans meet national curriculum standards. You can edit your lesson plan using Aila, quickly generating downloadable lesson plans, editable slide decks, and starter and exit quizzes. You may also choose to adapt or add to the resources after download.
Can I customise lessons?
Yes! Aila is designed to guide you through the process of co-creating a lesson. The more you specify to Aila, the better your lesson will be. You can ask Aila to adapt the lesson to suit your geographical context, the reading age of students in your class, or any other additional needs your pupils may have. The materials you produce with Aila are also fully editable.
What are the advantages of using Aila?
Aila has been based upon Oak's curriculum principles Aila is designed to take you through the process that an expert teacher would use to plan a lesson; starting with your lesson outcome and breaking that down into manageable chunks of learning, our learning cycles.
It encourages you to think about the prior knowledge that students will require for the lesson, the vocabulary that will need to be explicitly taught during the lesson, the key knowledge that you want pupils to take from the lesson and the common misconceptions or errors that pupils make in this topic.
Our learning cycles are designed to ensure clear explanations - we provide image and slide text suggestions to allow for dual coding, we've ensured slide design minimises extraneous cognitive load for students and built-in regular checks for understanding tasks followed by lots of practice for students.
The process is designed to be flexible. You can tweak and change the lesson as it is being created to suit the needs of your pupils, as you know them best! The beauty of Aila is that it won't produce your generic off-the-shelf lesson; it will help you craft a lesson that is accessible and appropriate for your students.
Aila uses a technique called retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate the high-quality Oak content, which has been carefully and expertly created by real-life teachers and quality-checked by subject experts. This should improve the accuracy of the lessons being produced. Aila has been designed for UK teachers so you are less likely to see Americanisms and the content will be more closely aligned with the English national curriculum.
Why has Oak created Aila when other AI assistants are already available?
Aila draws on existing Oak content, which has been carefully and expertly created by real-life teachers and quality-checked by subject experts. Aila has been designed around the Oak curriculum principles, which are national curriculum aligned and geared towards UK users. With Aila, you're less likely to see Americanisms, and the content will align much more closely with the requirements of teachers in England.
What are the limitations of Aila's features?
We know that images are really important to support explanations and Aila doesn't currently produce images or diagrams. Image production is a feature that will come with a future iteration of Aila, but to help teachers with this aspect of lesson design, we currently provide an 'image suggestion' to help you find an appropriate image with Google.
We are aware that complex concepts may require more than one slide to support their explanation. We are developing this feature but think this is the part of a lesson that will need the most development from a teacher after export.
Large Language Models are not as good at producing high-quality content for some subjects and this is a limitation of Aila. We know that the output isn't as good in certain subjects yet, in particular STEM subjects and modern foreign languages. We are actively working to improve these subjects.
Why does Aila only output in Oak format?
When designing Aila, we wanted pedagogical rigour to be at its core. Oak's lesson design is underpinned by research in learning and cognitive science, which has formed the structure of the lessons that Aila produces. All outputs are fully editable, so you can update them to your preferred formats.
Why is there only one type of questioning in the quizzes?
Multiple-choice questions are a really effective way of quickly assessing pupils' mastery of content, but they take a really long time to write, so we have included lots to save you time. After export, you can edit these to remove the options and make them short answer questions or even add additional question types to your slides.
Aila is still very much in development and we're aiming to add more question types in future.
Support and assistance
Is support available if I encounter any issues or have questions?
Yes, we provide comprehensive support to assist with any issues or questions users may have. You can contact us via email.
Can I provide feedback or suggest improvements for Aila?
Yes, please do! We love to hear how users are finding our resources and how we can improve them. Submit your feedback or suggestions .
Are there resources available for troubleshooting common problems?
The more feedback we receive from users, the more we can identify common problems and provide troubleshooting tips.
Accessibility
Are there features in place to support diverse learners and educators?
We want as many people as possible to be able to use Aila. You should be able to; change colours, contrast levels, and fonts; read and use most of the website while zoomed in up to 400%; navigate most of the website using just a keyboard; navigate most of the website using speech recognition software; listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver). View our full accessibility statement.
Can lesson plans be adapted for students with SEND?
Of course! You can prompt Aila to factor in your pupils' needs when generating your lesson plan. Try asking Aila to produce texts of different reading ages, sentence starters, or alternative activities to support pupils during the additional materials section of the lesson. You are also able to download and edit all resources after you have created your lesson.
Usage and best practices
What are some best practices for maximising the effectiveness of Aila?
Work with Aila to co-create your lesson. Before you proceed to the next steps of co-creating your lesson with Aila, it is important to check that you are happy with your lesson outcomes and learning cycle outcomes, as this will determine the content for the rest of the lesson.
If you want the content to be adapted for a specific geographical context, reading age or a specific pupil need, tell Aila at the start so that that is taken into consideration when designing the lesson content.
The additional materials section of the lesson is the most flexible. If you would like teacher instructions for a practical lesson, model answers, essay-style questions, narratives for your explanations or texts differentiated by reading age for your classes, just ask at the end of the lesson planning process and Aila will create these for you.
Technical
How does Aila work?
Aila is built to use Chat GPT4, but we are also evaluating other models. We have written a 9,000-word prompt that provides very specific guidance on what excellence looks like for each section of a lesson.
Aila also uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to integrate the high-quality content of Oak's human-planned lessons into the lessons being delivered. This means that the accuracy of the content produced should be closely aligned with the needs of teachers in England.
Updates and enhancements
Are there plans for future enhancements or new features?
Yes, we strive to constantly improve our resources, taking into account feedback from our users - Aila is still very much in development. We aim to release future iterations of Aila that produce images and diagrams. We are also developing Aila to ensure that it has pedagogical rigour for a range of different subjects.
Can users suggest features for future updates?
Of course, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for other features that would support your teaching. Please give us your feedback!
How often are updates released for Aila?
We're still in the beta phase, which means that whilst we're allowing teachers to use it, it's still prone to bugs and errors, and is still under constant development. We're constantly receiving feedback and aim to improve and iterate on an almost daily basis!
How will Aila be evaluated?
The team at Oak constantly evaluates Aila, and we are designing multiple approaches to this. We carry out consistency checks and ensure that it follows the instructions we have built into the prompt, and evaluate the quality of content being produced.
We aim to evaluate several factors, such as Americanisms, cultural biases, the appropriateness of the literacy level, checking that the learning cycles increase in difficulty, and more.
Nonetheless, generative AI will make mistakes, and the outputs should be checked carefully.
Other concerns
Is Oak trying to replace teachers with AI?
Absolutely not! At Oak, we share the brilliance of teachers from across the country through our resources, and our Aila is no different. It is designed to keep teachers in the driving seat, with support from AI to reduce their workload.
Data privacy and security
Is Aila safe to use?
Generative AI will make mistakes, and no two outputs are the same. With that in mind, it's important to check any AI-generated content thoroughly before using it in the classroom. We have put in place a number of technical and policy measures to minimise the risks that generative AI presents but care should still be taken, for example, you must not input personally identifiable information into Aila, and this is in breach of the terms and conditions of use.
Can I have unlimited use?
In order to prevent misuse, we've restricted and protected the volume of requests that can be made, lessons, and resources that can be generated. If you're reaching these limits, we'd love to hear from you, and you can request a higher limit.
What ethical measures are you putting in place?
Generative AI is a new and cutting-edge technology, and it's important that anyone developing AI products actively takes into account privacy, security and ethical considerations. We have looked into emerging guidance and governance on generative AI, including;
- UNESCO's core principles on a human-rights centred approach to the Ethics of AI
- US office for Edtech; Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning
- UK DfE position on Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education
Aila is designed to:
keep the human in the loop, informing and involving expert teachers and educators in the process
not involve the input of personal information to LLMs
allow us to evaluate cultural biases that may be present in the generated content
create guardrails around the generative AI to improve pedagogical alignment
be transparent and explainable to users; we openly share the underlying prompts
Aila
Why did you decide to name Oak's AI lesson assistant, Aila?
The name is an acronym for 'AI lesson assistant'. We wanted the name to have 'AI' in it, as our research found that teachers would be more likely to use an AI product if it was clear that it was AI-powered and could save them time. Further research into the name led to some deeper connections which helped to solidify our decision. 'Aila' means 'oak tree' in Hebrew, and in Scottish Gaelic, Aila means 'from the strong place'. We believe the rigour and quality of Aila stems from the strong foundation provided by both Oak's strong curriculum principles and the high-quality, teacher-generated content that we have been able to integrate into the lesson development process.
Why did you give it a human name?
In Aila's initial testing phases, users reported being unsure of how to 'talk' to the assistant. Giving it a name humanises the chatbot and encourages more natural conversation.