What does AI mean for Education?
Since its introduction, AI technology has created significant concerns for education. While teachers’ jobs remain safe, the worry is that students will show less effort in class with their newfound ability to auto-generate classwork within seconds.
The risk poses a real threat for a generation that may become unable to rely on itself for critical thinking, but that couldn't be further from the truth when looking at how AI is innovating teaching tools to create better learning environments for curious students.
Public school
The Office of Educational Technology (OET) has already published an entire section on its website dedicated to the discussion of AI and how they see it as a beneficial tool for students. According to the OET, AI is a tool that can impact a variety of educational scenarios:
Innovate interaction: AI gives students a unique ability to be able to interact with their learning materials which could create compelling projects like history where they can interview historical figures themselves.
Identify learning variability: Not everyone learns the same way and AI can help special education teachers who have to navigate a number of disabilities in the classroom.
Adapt to student learning: Some students learn faster than others which AI can assist by creating material uniquely designed to each student’s learning methods so they don’t fall behind by scaffolding.
Enhance feedback loops: AI can also assist teachers with grading by analyzing minute patterns in a student’s work over a semester.
Support educators: Lesson planning can be a tedious process for many teachers which AI can solve by helping create learning material that is engaging and thought-provoking.
University-level
Stanford University recently held its AI+Education Summit to discuss the pros and cons of AI technology and how it needs to be used in the classroom. Rhetorical questions were raised comparing the new technology to calculators, suggesting that AI would not replace critical thinking in the same way that computational devices have not removed standard arithmetic from curriculums.
Points were also made about how AI allows professors to develop their own skills as teachers which can be difficult to measure. In modern pedagogy, there is a pushback against using test scoring as an indicator of teaching ability because it removes the student’s individuality from the equation, but the search for better alternatives has only created more debate.
However, AI allows professors to bounce back ideas and also simulate student interaction to judge what aspects of a course, curriculum, or project need to be modified in order for the material to be understood.
Private Tutoring
Private education has a lot of room for innovation as well with many students using it to get ahead in class or understand crucial information they have missed in the past. Either way, automated tutor bots pose their own set of solutions that can help students learn new material.
Platforms like Khan Academy are already offering AI courses for students to delve deeper into the technology. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, also spoke at the AI+Education Summit, saying that AI offers teachers a way to refresh their expertise and update curriculums based on new information.
