Learning is not a spectator sport.
— D. Blocher
Real-time classroom engagement — the lecture is heard, questions are generated, and the teacher decides what students see.
The Problem
In live classrooms — online or physical — there is no reliable way to know if students are following along while teaching is happening. Traditional tools like polls or quizzes break the flow: they need to be prepared in advance, demand extra attention from an instructor already managing an entire room, and fail to adapt to what is actually being taught at that moment.
What We Built
Spandan listens to the instructor's live speech, transcribes it, and generates questions grounded in exactly what was just said. The teacher sees them first — approving or discarding before anything goes out. Students respond on their phones, and the room sees results and a live leaderboard update in real time, while the class is still in session.
In the Room
Spandan works best in large rooms where one person is teaching many — the settings where the gap between teaching and feedback is widest.
Spandan was used in the Samagama online internship, a cohort of over 2,000 learners attending live sessions remotely. In a fully online setting, the gap between teaching and feedback is even wider. No raised hands, no visible faces, no ambient read of the room.
Spandan filled that gap. Sessions with live question generation and a real-time leaderboard turned passive watching into active participation, and gave coordinators a clear signal on whether the content was landing while the session was still running.
2,000+ learners across Samagama cohortsFDPs bring together faculty from multiple institutions for intensive, structured learning. The audience is expert, the content is dense, and the stakes of losing the room are high. Spandan lets the facilitator take the temperature of the group without slowing down.
Questions grounded in what was just said test whether participants are tracking the argument — not general subject knowledge they arrived with.
Used across CBPAI cohortsWorkshops often have mixed audiences — some participants following closely, others less so. Spandan surfaces that spread without singling anyone out. The session record shows which explanations held and which ones didn't, across the whole room.
Each session builds a record of what was asked, when, and how the room responded. Over time this becomes a picture of the teaching — not a report on individual students.
Session analytics includedWhere It's Going
The live demo above is what exists today. Here's what the lab is actively building toward.