After the pandemic, the student absenteeism rate in the United States has significantly increased, leading to a rise in teachers' workloads. Facing an increasingly severe challenge, the American ed-tech company Panorama Education has leveraged AWS cloud services to develop a generative AI platform called Solara. This innovative tool is designed to help teachers swiftly analyze student data and create personalized support plans, greatly alleviating their administrative burdens.
According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, over 25% of students miss more than 10% of school each year, a figure that is nearly twice as high as pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, teachers are increasingly experiencing burnout due to overwhelming job stress, which creates a dilemma for district leadership when it comes to providing support for the students who need it most.
As a leading education technology provider with over a decade of service experience, Panorama Education truly understands this challenge. They’ve launched Solara on the AWS platform, a generative AI tool designed specifically for K12 educators, from kindergarten to 12th grade. Solara aims to help educators quickly interpret student data and develop personalized improvement plans, all while ensuring the privacy and security of that data.
Teachers and school leaders can ask questions in natural language. For instance, What kind of support does this student need?Solara will extract relevant key insights from the district's existing systems, enabling quick identification of issues like long-term absenteeism, declining grades, or behavioral problems, and will summarize them in easy-to-understand language.
When school leaders question a student's attendance, Solara steps in to identify potential connections, revealing patterns among attendance rates, assessment scores, and behavioral data. It links absences to declining grades and diminished self-efficacy. Within seconds, Solara crafts evidence-based, personalized action plans for teachers, incorporating strategies for improving attendance, academics, or behavior.
Technical Director Danny Johnson emphasized that privacy and security were the top priorities during the development of Solara. The platform's initial code name was Surrounding Wall Garden, highlighting the importance of security.
Recently, Panorama has migrated its product suite to AWS to enhance its scalability and reliability. During the development of Solara, we worked closely with AWS solution architects and strategists to further optimize the system prompt design and data security.
Solara complies with U.S. Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and SOC 2 Type 2 standards. Johnson noted that all operations are stateless, allowing real-time context to be relayed to the AI model while ensuring data security.
In just a few months, Solara has quickly evolved from concept to prototype, and now it's ready for trial use. The backend utilizes Amazon Bedrock's Anthropic Claude 3.7 as its large language model, combined with Amazon S3 and AWS KMS to manage secure encryption of data, ensuring integrity and privacy. The team also leverages Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to maintain appropriate privacy and usage controls.
By early 2025, Solara will have supported over 380,000 students across 25 states in the U.S., receiving positive feedback from teachers and district leaders alike. Many educators have stated that Solara acts like a smarter assistant in the classroom, significantly enhancing their efficiency at work.
In California's Laguna Beach Unified School District, Solara enables staff to quickly respond to student needs, allowing them to draft a variety of content that meets district requirements, such as student support plans and differentiated instructional materials, all while saving teachers valuable time.
The Panorama team envisions Solara not just as a tool for boosting work efficiency, but as part of a larger mission to transform teaching into a sustainable and meaningful profession. The introduction of AI will help automate daily administrative tasks, allowing educators to focus on enhancing student learning outcomes.
Therefore, even though Solara primarily targets the US market, this model holds significant reference value for the education sector in Hong Kong. Teachers in Hong Kong face similar workloads and hope to have comparable AI tools to assist in analyzing student data and formulating support plans to enhance teaching efficiency. While promoting the development of smart education in Hong Kong, educational technology companies can draw inspiration from Panorama's successful experiences to create AI educational tools tailored to local needs, further helping teachers allocate more time to their students.
