Alpha School uses AI to teach students academics for just two hours a day

AUSTIN, Texas - One Austin woman believes traditional schooling is outdated and filled with busy work. 

That's why she created a new learning method where there are no teachers, and students learn academics through an AI tutor on a series of apps, for just two hours a day.

"Our students are learning twice as fast as students in a traditional classroom, but they are doing it in only 2 hours a day," said MacKenzie Price, co-founder of the Alpha School in downtown Austin.

Here’s how the 2-Hour Learning program works:

Students have guides instead of teachers who are there to support students through a self-driven learning model covering the core subjects. 

As for the rest of the school day, it's spent developing life skills like public speaking, leadership, teamwork, and entrepreneurship through workshops.

"Life skills workshops can look different depending on which school they go to, we have a school that’s all about sports, and a school where kids are doing robotics and coding and writing books," said Price.

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The idea started when Price was frustrated with the educational system. Her daughter came home from school and said it was boring.

"Kids don't have to sit in class doing academics for six hours a day, they can crush their academics in only two hours and develop life skills the rest of the day," said Price.

Price says despite only learning academics two hours a day, Alpha School still outperformed peers in traditional school. She also says the data shows it works through Map Testing, which is how they track a student’s progress.  

"Under 2-Hour Learning our results are incredible. Our students are in the top 2% in the country in how they’re learning in the country," Price said.

Scott Jensen says when he saw his children struggling academically during the COVID-19 pandemic, he needed to make a switch. At first, he was skeptical of app-based learning.

"We had a fear of whether this is going to work. And it's hard to, you know, hard to create science experiments with your kids and accept that you're going to throw them into this environment. Will they lose a year? But they have it. It's working. It's working for all the kids at the school. There's no one that it isn't working for," said Jensen.

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Now his two boys are in the Alpha system. His son, 9-year-old Marshall has been doing 2-hour learning for three years.

Marshall says his favorite part of this type of learning is being able to learn at his own pace.

About learning from an app versus a teacher in the classroom, he said, "Basically, just a teacher in the classroom, it's kind of hard to like, to remember everything, and they just say it once. And if you get the question wrong, they don't just go back over it then. And then they just go to the next question. But in academics, you just do like if you get a question wrong, [the app] gives you an explanation of how to get it correct for the next question. And that helps you."

The Alpha School has since grown to K-12 and has since launched three additional schools who use the same academic framework.

Price says at the end of the day, it's all about having children become successful academically, developing life skills and most importantly loving their time at school.

You can learn more about the 2 Hour Learning model here.