Case Study

How the School of Health Sciences, Ngee Ann polytechnic, used AI to improve student engagement and educator productivity

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of students logged in regularly

out of 5.00 rating for AI experience

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hours of time savings per lecturer per year

Too much assessments, too little time

Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of Health Sciences had a challenge with their lecturers who spent too much time grading practice / mock assessment papers that students worked on in preparation for their final exams. While these activities are highly essential to students’ learning, they are time-consuming and highly repetitive. 

Re-channelling lecturers time to solve complex teaching and learning issues

The Noodle Factory platform, Walter, provided a practical use of AI to automate time-consuming tasks such as marking, feedback and tutoring for Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Health Sciences lecturers. Because Natural Language Processing algorithms are used, Walter can automatically grade open-ended questions by comparing the student responses against the lecturer’s set of recommended answers, as well as past year papers, which formed the dataset to increase the accuracy of the AI marking engine. In addition, the AI-powered Q&A engine enables lecturers to easily set up a knowledge base for tutoring, simply by dropping in lecture notes and slides. This knowledge base is the core of the AI tutor, which continues to engage students round the clock, anytime, anywhere.  

Through Walter, the lecturers at the School of Health Sciences are now able to:  

  • Scale personalised tutoring as the AI tutor goes through key concepts with students and adapts to their individual needs.  

  • Automate repetitive tasks like grading and creating practice assessments easily with our simple-to-use interface.

  • Utilise educator-focused analytics to analyse students’ activity, identify gaps and students at risk, render early intervention and gather and track learning metrics.

The AI marker and tutor provide win-win solutions in learning as students get instant feedback and personalised learning respectively. Staff now have more time with students that need targeted help.

Dr Phang Chiew Hun
Director, School of Health Sciences, Ngee Ann Polytechnic

Students love Walter too!

Contextualised AI tutoring and AI grading: 

The AI tutor has been shown to keep students engaged by tutoring them according to their level of knowledge. Students' learning becomes more optimal as feedback is given as soon as they complete their practice assessments. 

Optimised student-lecturer interaction: 

With AI tutor Walter, students can send their answers for review anytime for their lecturers' review. When the request for review is sent, Walter proactively reaches out to lecturers and lecturers can send custom follow-up prompts to students. 

A smarter learning and teaching experience for all

After a year of deploying Noodle Factory to the 600 students at the School of Health Sciences, we found: 

  • Students were engaged in their chat-based learning. In fact, 91% of students had logged into Walter regularly.

  • Students rated the tutoring experience a 4.26 out of 5.00. Students loved how the AI tutor was able to provide instant individualized feedback, without their teachers always having to be involved in the process.

The most impact we saw, in this case, was the benefits seen amongst the lecturers who used the AI tutor. 

  • By automating marking, feedback and tutoring, each lecturer gained over 100 hours in that year. 

Since 2020, the institution has been using Noodle Factory's AI learning platform for over 1,000 of its students in the Nursing department. 

School of Health Sciences, Ngee Ann Polytechnic

Ngee Ann Polytechnic is one of the leading institutions of higher learning in Singapore. Within its nine academic schools, the School of Health Sciences aims to provide the best learning environment to prepare students for work and industry demands. 

Subject(s): Health Sciences, Nursing  

Learning Audience: Vocational Education

Location: Singapore

Used AI for: AI Marker, AI Tutor

User Size: ~600 students