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Online education provider One On One Educational Services Limited says it will soon be rolling out its artificial intelligence powered system that will, among other things, make the writing of lesson plans quicker and easier for teachers across the region.
President and CEO of One On One Ricardo Allen said UnaAI will enable teachers to quickly generate lesson plans, handouts, and assessments to directly tackle identified learning gaps, and enable students to receive personalized support and guidance by targeting specific areas they struggle with.
He said the software would be tailored specifically to Jamaica’s curriculum and culture.
“This is not Chat GPT. It’s much better … We’ve been working with teachers privately to refine what we’re doing to make it better. And now we believe that we’re at a stage where we can have more teachers seeing this. So, no more spending Sunday afternoons writing lesson plans and content for your classes,” Allen told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting held online last Friday.
UnaAI is part of One On One’s One Academy National Virtual School that utilises an advanced online education platform to deliver solutions that support schools, teachers, and students.
The company’s revenues were $91.8 million in the first quarter of its financial year ending November 30 last year, which is up 69 per cent from $54.5 million when compared to the 2023 comparable period
“This growth was primarily driven by the expansion of One Academy, our K-12 education arm providing personalized educational solutions for schools, teachers, and students across the Caribbean region,” the directors report to shareholders said.
The company turned a small profit of $940,000 for the year ending August 31 last year, with revenue growing by 13.8 per cent to $303 million.
Allen said the One Academy NVS is now available in more than 250 schools in the English-speaking Caribbean, with most in Jamaica and The Bahamas. However, company chairman Michael Bernard declined to state in which other countries One On One was involved.
“At this point in time, we are not in a position to disclose until those countries have gotten to a point in their whole governance and protocol process where they will allow us to share this information with the public,” Bernard said.
Asked about the use of the Chinese AI large language model DeepSeek as well as Open AI, Allen said his company had tested both and was using neither of them.
“We’ve tested it (DeepSeek) in some of our workflows. We still believe that there’s a better way to do it. So, we’re not using DeepSeek, and by the way, we’re also not using Open AI … Our belief is that large language models will be heavily commoditised in the future. They will be dime a dozen, coming from different countries, but each one of them have their own biases. And with bias, if we’re not careful, we become a colonialised state by using these large language models to lead our operation,” Allen said.
The CEO said One On One had instead taken a foundational model and refined it to achieve personalised results.
Allen also said about 70 per cent of the company’s revenue was coming from government sources, with the other 30 per cent from the private sector. He said this was likely to be the case in the short term.
Meanwhile chairman Bernard said it was unlikely that the company would make a dividend payment this year.
“The phase that our business is in at this time, we want to consider and continue to invest in the company to build it to deliver sustainable performance going into the future such that we will be in a position to pay decent dividends going forward,” he said.
English (US) ·