How Penn Foster is scaling student success with AI feedback

Penn Foster Group’s students needed timely, consistent feedback on their assignments—but huge submission volumes made it hard to keep pace.

AI feedback offered a solution. Chief Learning Officer Andrew Shean and his team tested multiple vendors, but their tools couldn’t deliver the quality or scale they needed.

Then they found Feedback Aide.

Penn Foster Group has been delivering flexible, accessible education for over 135 years. Originally a correspondence school, today it operates entirely online, offering everything from high school diplomas to career-focused college programs. With a self-paced learning model and a student base that spans from teenagers to adult learners, the organization’s mission is to create career-aligned, affordable learning pathways that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

“Many of our students are in an economic life situation where we’re seen as their last chance,” said Andy Shean, Chief Learning Officer for the Penn Foster Group. “For them to get that high school diploma and become a manager, the economic and life implications are transformational.”

The challenge: Delivering high-quality, consistent AI feedback at scale

With thousands of students submitting essays in a self-paced, asynchronous model, Penn Foster was facing mounting pressure on its English courses. First, with a high volume of submissions, the team needed to find ways to improve the delivery of timely, personalized feedback. Second, students often submitted off-topic or incomplete work, especially those new to academic writing. This created frustrating cycles of returns and resubmissions.

The third challenge was ensuring consistency. With many different graders working across a large and growing student population, maintaining a uniform standard of feedback was difficult.

“Because of our scale—over 90,000 students in our online high school—you can imagine the sheer volume of papers that are submitted that need to be graded,” said Andy. “So students get really frustrated if their paper’s late, or if they don’t understand the feedback, or if the feedback’s not always consistent. It creates a real learner experience issue.”

Read the full case study here.