How can AI be used in Education?
AI can help in various different ways, both teachers, institutions and students in achieving their best versions of themselves. By constantly supporting education and the educational processes around them. I have a vision of AI in education that is to have a teacher for every student, to have personalized learning that brings out the best in every person.
How will AI help education? Education can be helped by helping teachers streamline the processes of providing courses to students, monitoring the progress, and also identifying the best capabilities that there is in every person. Since the student of today will be the workers of the future, they need to be exposed to AI and also being able to work collaboratively hand in hand together, with AI systems of the future. Teachers, nowadays have a lot of load. They have 100’s of students to take care of and educate, and they cannot take care of and to educate, and they cannot be expected to monitor the progress of each and every student individually. This is where AI can play to its strength, that of progressives and monitoring the progress of every person in the best way possible. Also, future AI systems will be able to observe, not just by things like exams or asking questions but also by observing a person. Are they having a frustrated look on their face, are they managing to understand what is the concept, maybe having interactive questions to see that a concept has been explained and understood correctly by people. In this way AI will be able to say, ‘Ok, this person has understood the concept’, or ‘Let me change my approach and try something different, something more fun’. Like this, people will be learning better and extracting the information and whatever they need to learn, in a better way.
Ai can also help bring Universal Access to students, especially those that have to travel a lot of distance to get to school or maybe, as you have seen recently, when you have lockdown periods or periods where people have to attend classes in an online fashion, to be able to do this remotely. Sometimes there are certain skills which are very difficult to teach in a remote way, especially when it comes to physical education and physical skills, but a lot of things that are taught, can actually be taught remotely and online. With the support and help of some local resources, such as people you can interact with, you can do quite a lot of things with online coaching. With the right format and tools, I think that this will be something that will be more and more present.
Also, having universal access means that students, even in remote locations and maybe underdeveloped places will be able to get the best quality of education resources whenever they are in the world. Making everyone have the best education there is.
AI can also be used as a tool to obviously assist educators rather than replacing them, in line with the philosophy that AI should always be a tool to assist that enhances human life. By helping teachers and educators assess the students and also making these continuous assessments and spotting problematic areas and areas where students excel, it is going to reduce the administrative burden of both educators and also administration of schools. Thus, allowing human educators to spend more time, one on one with their students making sure that there is that human contact and human touch that cannot be replaced anytime soon with AI. This will help us get the best of both worlds, having the AI teach you — especially when it comes to facts, concepts and then having a human educator bringing that human touch into play. Making sure that everything is gelled together and that you get the best education system possible.
AI doesn’t need to be only used in the classroom, AI can be everywhere thanks to smartphones, tablets ..etc and it can help continuous assessment and also continuous improvement. You can take your AI in different areas, you can also take it outside — let’s say you are trying to learn how to do one particular move, the AI can also assess you and act like a virtual coach. This concept of education doesn’t need to be limited to the traditional sense of something that needs to be taught in a classroom, but it can also be used to interact physically. With wearable sensor technology, AI can also assess your performance on different things. For example, in running, jumping or figure skating — and this is something that blurs the concept of traditional education and self-improvement.
My vision for AI, is that AI will help people constantly self-improve, in a way like a mentor rather than the concept of educators that are just giving you one thing at a time, it is mentoring you and helping you improve in a lifelong process of learning.
The idea of customizing the curriculum for each and every student is not something that can be done in a very practical way nowadays, but AI will enable this. What will happen once this happens, is that people will also become more intelligent and absorb more to become more motivated to observe more and thus will have a positive impact and a life-long lasting impact on everyone’s life. As a result, we will have the multiplier effect, people will be more motivated, they make better use of their skills and their tendencies and aptitudes towards different skills and different things they want to learn and do more of, and then this will have a positive effect on society.
I’m looking forward to watching AI be pervasive in the education system and in the mentoring of everyone.
