Amidst all the AI apps for education, I’m hoping the next wave will help us tackle unique organizational issues—not just enhance lesson plans, grading, and assessments.

I’ve been experimenting with AI to address some of these challenges. For example, how can a teacher turn a simple request like:

“I want to add an event called ‘Lunch Duty’ on all Rotation Days 3 & 4, Period 3.”

Into a CSV file of events?

Let’s say a school operates on an 8-day rotation schedule, so rotation days sometimes fall on different weekdays. I used OpenAI’s Assistant API, uploading our rotation day-to-calendar date schedule and period times as CSV files to the Code Interpreter, and developed an elaborate prompt.

However, no matter how I prompt it, the output initially creates the event only for the first occurrence of those rotation days. It generates all 100+ events only after prompting again. While the API works well for generating large text content and lesson plans, it seems less effective for producing large datasets.

Also, it’s not cheap to do it that way—about 54,000 tokens for Assitant API to generate about 500 rows using code interpreter—so it may not be economical. In the end, my reflections are that it might be best to collect those inputs from teachers in a structured format and just run good old JavaScript, or perhaps offload text to an OpenAI API to return a structured JSON using OpenAI API Functions and then process that in your app or code.

My questions to the community are:

• Has anyone gotten a large structured output in the first prompt using OpenAI API (either via an assistant, completions, functions, or code interpreter)?
• Does anyone have experience using open-source language models for tasks like this?

I aim to embed this functionality into the Bulk Google Calendar Editor Add-on that I built so teachers can easily add these one-off events, like lunch breaks or taking a particular block for three months, etc., to their calendars.

Considering all the AI tools for education, I’m eager to find solutions that help with practical administrative tasks or challenges that schools may face. Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated!