Amesite, founded in Ann Arbor in 2017 by Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, is an ed-tech Software-as-a-Service product seeking to transform learning for higher education and businesses. Amesite’s mission is to improve the way the world learns by making education more affordable, accessible, and engaging. What differentiates Amesite from other online learning platforms is its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that curate and create content for students, while reducing inefficiencies and administrative work for instructors. According to founder Dr. Sastry, “Teachers love the platform, because whatever a computer can do, the platform does. So they can focus their efforts on engaging with their learners.”
Amesite recently partnered with Wayne State University in Detroit to create Warrior TechSource. Wayne State’s College of Engineering found that their alumni needed a workforce training program that was affordable, convenient, and relevant to continue their education. To solve this gap, Amesite created a holistic platform for the school’s alumni that provides fully online, on-demand courses with live instructors. Amesite’s AI technology read hundreds of thousands of articles about recent technological developments in fields of alumni interest and suggested the most informative readings for each lesson in the platform. This allows instructors to focus on teaching and student engagement, while allowing the AI to identify the most important materials, and do administrative work like grading. While the program is currently focused on automotive engineering courses, the school plans to expand its offerings. According to Dean of Engineering Farshad Fotouhi, “We needed to develop workforce development courses and training courses online, and we thought their platform is more suitable than some of the other platforms that are out there. It can be offered to somebody from business, the School of Medicine, law school, somebody who wants to learn about blockchain, or from nursing who wants to learn about data science.”