Grant Open

Next Token Personalization™ for Seamless Personalized Education Experiences Delivered at Scale

NCER

Program: From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program

Award amount: $500,000

Principal investigator: Jacob Zax

Awardee:

Edify Technologies, Inc

Year: 2025

Award period: 1 year (09/30/2025 - 09/29/2026)

Project type:

Other

Award number: R305J250023

Purpose

The challenge of using accessible language in instruction and differentiating content for students at various skill levels is fundamental to education. In particular, the words of collective instruction in education have been bound in fixed form for the broad range of students who receive them; whether written or spoken, in person or online, for 3rd graders or 9th graders. To address this problem, this S2S Phase I project proposes an exploration of Next Token Personalization™ (NTP system, for short), a patent-pending technical approach to personalizing the language used in education for students based on their unique capacities, needs, and goals. The NTP system uses historical and live profile data to optimize a vast range of instructional experiences for individual students by selectively modifying tokens while preserving the original source’s meaning. The NTP system’s AI-corpus architecture creates critical consistency, cost-savings, and quality control for content used in K-12 education, and empowers the NTP system to present source token variations and configurations in different or multiple languages, across various mediums such as text and audio, and through ongoing personalized adaptations of a work or instruction on a real-time basis.

By customizing language in instructional experiences for individual students, the NTP system can optimize for each learner’s unique zone of proximal development. Creating an open-source ecosystem around this innovation that benefits all parties through a constantly improving model for personalized language – which can be used by students as a chrome plugin, mobile phone app, or through other means – has the potential to overcome traditional barriers to scale in education. Ultimately, by helping to mediate the tension and tradeoff between collective curriculum and individual student needs, Next Token Personalization™ may improve student outcomes in U.S. K-12 education at SPEED, and at scale!

Project Activities

Edify Technologies has taken key initial steps to identify, create, and protect intellectual property related to Next Token Personalization™. Now, Edify and WestEd, a national nonprofit research organization, propose to conduct research, customer discovery, and beginning prototype development in Phase I that will help clarify open questions about the best approach to implement the NTP system in K-12 education. First, WestEd will present Edify’s existing materials to five subject matter experts (SMEs) to gather initial feedback. Informed by concept testing from this small SME review, Edify will proceed with refining a theory of change and exploring possible implementation models for NTP system, including through extensive customer discovery with key stakeholders. Through this process, Edify will produce a set of draft deliverables that thoroughly explain the vision for Next Token Personalization™, which WestEd will present to a second set of 10-12 SMEs with expertise across a range of content subject areas and insight into a diverse range of students. With feedback from the large SME review in hand, the Edify team will then produce the Proof-of-Concept Report, R&D Plan, and Early-Stage Prototype that comprise the Phase I S2S deliverables. All deliverables will be deeply informed by the perspective of the educators, communities, and experts engaged throughout Phase I, establishing a solid foundation for potential Phase II research and development on the proposed NTP system.