The Increasing Use Of AI In Education

AI is having a dramatic impact on education and learning at all levels, and across the board from early learning education to late in life continuing education. AI is making a significant impact not only for those who are learning, but those who are teaching and administering education. Indeed, one of the lasting impacts in this latest wave of AI interest is its impact on the way people learn and teach.

How AI is Improving Learning

Learning is not only something that people do when they are young and at school, but also something that they must do throughout their adult lives as they learn new things for their jobs, develop their hobbies, learn a language, or any other personal interest. From this perspective, learning and education is just as fundamental a daily activity as any other. Without a doubt, then, AI’s impact on education is having a profound impact on our daily lives.

Today’s learning and educational systems are mostly one-size-fits-all, or at least one-size-fits-many approach. Yet people’s learning is as unique as there are people. Since everyone learns at a different pace and in different ways, the ability to tailor learning material to each person’s particular needs and preferences is incredibly important. AI is particularly useful in “hyperpersonalizing” education, in which we can treat each individual as an individual and provide a deeply personalized learning experience. This personalized approach is helping students learn at their own pace, addressing their individual strengths and weaknesses, rephrasing or reframing content so that it can be better understood, and helping learners focus on areas where they need or want to dive deeper. AI-based intelligent tutoring systems are also providing personalized assistance, guiding students through difficult topics and adapting to student needs in real time, providing hints, explanations or feedback. These capabilities are helping people retain and gain a more fundamental and deeper understanding of the material, which is the purpose of education.

One particular application of this type of hyperpersonalized education is in language learning. Learning a language is one of those hard things, since it involves not only comprehending a foreign language in the context of a language you already know, but also the ability to speak and write and read that language in a way that makes sense. AI systems have already proven to be particularly adept at machine translation between multiple languages, so it makes sense to combine the continuously improving natural language processing ability of AI systems with hypersonalization capabilities to tailor learning for each student. The end result is a highly optimized learning approach that can teach even the most difficult student how to communicate in another language.

How AI is Improving Teaching

Not only is AI helping the learner, but it is also helping the educator. AI tools can be used to assist, augment, and help alleviate some of the many manual tasks that can make the teaching process burdensome. AI systems are helping with grading and assessing homework, quizzes, and learner outputs. With the help of AI, teachers can reduce the time spent on grading so that they can focus more on student interaction. While learning in schools has mostly returned to in-person instruction, there is still a substantial role for online and virtual education, especially for professional and lifelong learning activities. In these contexts, AI systems are assisting with virtual classrooms by providing automated assessments of learner skills and monitoring learner behavior and participation. LIkewise, AI systems can provide real time translations, summarize learning materials, and produce additional learning content such as flash cards, spot quizzes, and engaging forms of content.

AI is also helping in the development and curation of learning content and curricula. AI systems can analyze educational data and figure out how to develop more effective curriculum. There’s a lot of room for AI in developing more effective educational material. Having automated and AI enhanced support and mentorship that can answer questions about the course material, help with issues with learning materials, assist with homework and managing assignments, and even provide career guidance is particularly helpful. So we can optimize the educational experience not only from the learner’s perspective, but also from the instructor’s perspective.

Improving Education Systems and Operations

Beyond teaching and learning educational material, AI is helping improve education as a whole. One of the critical needs of education is making sure it is accessible to all. AI is helping to improve overall learning accessibility for those who have different learning needs, providing alternate means to transfer content in different modes and in different forms. AI tools can easily facilitate speech to text and text to speech to enhance that accessibility for learners with hearing or visual impairments.

On the operations side, AI is giving more visibility and understanding on the analytics of learning. AI systems are being used to help predict each student’s performance leveraging the ability to look at vast amounts of data very quickly, and using past and current data to help predict future trends. These systems can identify students that might be at risk of falling behind and provide additional tools to assist the learners or guide educators. Educational institutions are using these platforms to analyze student data, helping educators intervene early and then provide necessary support to ensure student success.

Addressing the Fears and Concerns of AI in Education

While there are many really valid, good reasons to embrace AI in education, there are also many fears and concerns of the use of AI in education right now. Educators are afraid of learners using AI systems to cheat on work or exams, or otherwise shortcut their learning experience. Some of these concerns are valid, as students are cleverly using AI systems to summarize lectures and condense learning materials. Teachers are afraid of people not listening to lectures, recording the lectures, and then using AI tools to summarize them. If the outcome of the use of AI is that learners shortchange their own education and not get the expected learning outcomes, then indeed this is not a good use of AI. However, if the result is that students get better retention of materials and learn at a deeper level, then this is actually not a bad thing. The goal of the use of AI in education is to optimize for the goals of learning, which is understanding of the material and also deepening people’s desires and interests in whatever it is they’re trying to learn.

For sure, the future of education with AI will look very different from the educational universe today. Perhaps everyone will get their own hyperpersonalized AI augmented assistant that will stay with you your whole learning life to assist you as you continue to learn, and it grows in turn with you. Maybe education outcomes will become more accessible and valuable for everyone, and there will be less of a one-size-fits-many approach that works for some but doesn’t work for all.