Team: Soniq

Team Participants:

  • Dasha Binskaia (Al Camino Community College)
  • Jacob Aquino (Santiago Canyon College)
  • Nyi Shin “Ivan” Htet (De Anza College)
  • Paul Pham (Irvine Valley College)
  • Ricardo Balderas (Cuesta College)

“You find 85 videos, and you got to click through all of them to see if there’s any missing captions, and it’s going to take you 2 to 5 hours.” 

Problem

California Virtual Campus (CVC) certified online course reviewers spend 5-10 hours conducting initial Peer Online Course Rubric (POCR) assessments for each online course. This includes manually scanning full course exports for objective compliance items including heading structure, video captions, orientation modules, syllabus currency, and learning outcome mapping. This time-intensive manual review process limits reviewer capacity and prevents them from focusing on high-value activities like faculty coaching and remediation support. With hundreds of online courses requiring review annually across California Community Colleges, the existing workflow creates significant bottlenecks that delay course approval and strain reviewer availability. The heavy focus on routine compliance checks consumes time that could be better spent on subjective quality assessments and helping faculty improve their course design. 

Technical Solution

The Soniq team developed an AI-powered initial review system that automatically scans course exports against the 22 standard rubrics to flag course content alignment issues providing it to a certified human review for a final determination. The platform deterministically checks objective items like heading structure, caption presence, orientation completeness, and outcome alignment, providing reviewers with a pre-assessment report. The solution leverages AWS services including Lambda (serverless computing for automated workflows) and Amazon Bedrock (foundation models for generative AI applications) to analyze objective, automatable rubric items. The system delivers findings with evidence-based reasoning and location of error for every flagged item. This enables reviewers to shift their time from checklist validation toward meaningful faculty coaching. 

Showcase

Presentation RecordingA recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project.
SlideshowThe accompanying slides shown in the video.
Source CodeAll of the code and assets developed during the course of the AI Summer Camp.

About the DxHub

The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.