7 Ways How AI is Impacting Education

Artificial Intelligence has been an integral part of our lives for quite some time now without us even realizing it. Along with influencing many industries already, AI and machine learning will soon impact the education process too. Here are seven ways how this will happen.

1. Personalization

The traditional ways of teaching do not try to find special approaches to each student. The education process with AI, on the other hand, is all about personalization. Students will be able to get personalized materials that will fit their interests, needs, the pace of learning, and so on enabling them to show better results in the long run.

This is possible because AI technologies can process huge amounts of data, analyze them, and interpret them in order to form conclusions about what’s best for every student. This will, in turn, lead to higher retention rates and better performance among pupils.

2. Chatbots Replace Tutors

One of the most important benefits of AI is its ability for automation. Almost everything can be automated with AI technologies, and this includes the tutoring aspect of the education process. Once the course has been personalized to fit the student, chatbots can take on the roles of tutors to assist the student in a special way suitable only for that particular person.

Of course, there are some negative side effects of such an approach. For instance, the student might eventually feel alienated because they will spend a limited amount of time socializing with a human tutor. This issue should be taken into account when integrating chatbots for learning so that students are satisfied.

That being said, there has been a successful example of how to properly create a chatbot to be a virtual teaching assistant – and her name is Jill Watson. Georgia Institute of Technology wanted to find a way to deliver large amounts of learning material to its students while keeping their standards high. Their teaching assistant couldn’t answer all the student questions at once, so they found a solution in chatbots.

Jill Watson now replies to a variety of predictable questions such as those about how to format assignments and whether or not it is possible to resubmit the assignments. Jill was trained with the help of student queries and emails to create a database of such predictable questions and replies to them.

After all of Jill’s answers were checked by a human tutor, she was launched for students to use. Students don’t have to wait for a later reply anymore and feel like they are given the time and attention they deserve. The interactivity element is also something they enjoy.

3. Improved Course Material

Personalization of courses works not only for restructuring the course program but also for improving the course material itself. After gathering enough feedback about the course, AI technologies can then make the courses more individual and suitable for specific levels of knowledge and prior experience students have.

Nevertheless, there is the possibility of such courses becoming too personalized. This might lead to students getting completely different amounts of information throughout the same course and having different levels of knowledge at the end of the program. Human tutors need to optimize personalized courses after AI technologies improve the course material.

4. Multilingual Learning

The language barrier remains a problem to this day even though many people around the world are learning languages along with their mother tongue. AI will enable courses to be taught in different languages without having to spend as much money to optimize them for being taught in these languages.

Machine translation is still not perfect though, so it is better to rely on human translators for the time being. If you want to teach your course in a different language or simply provide the course material in a different language along with the main one, you can get it translated with the help of an online translation service.

5. Systematic Changes

While AI can improve the education process itself, it is important to acknowledge its use on a bigger scale too. AI technologies can help us review our current system of education and find the issues that need to be changed as soon as possible. We might then even go on to reinventing the whole system itself.

Education systems in different countries have their own flaws, but AI technologies can help us create a system that will be most suitable for the younger generations and will benefit them in the long run. From selecting courses more carefully to altering the whole learning framework, AI will definitely help us improve the way we get education nowadays.

But some learning apps have already revolutionized the way students can learn the necessary information. For example, Duolingo, an app for learning languages, uses chatbots as well as analytical AI to get better results from anyone using the app to either start learning a new language or improve their current language skills.

Though the app does operate in levels, it actually adapts the complexity of the questions you get about your current material depending on how you answered the previous question. If you made a mistake, the next question will be simpler (e.g. typing in the correct translation versus choosing the correct translation out of the proposed ones).

Before you even get to learning, you can choose whether you want to start from zero or you already know something. If you choose the latter option, the app will give you some questions to determine which level you need to be placed on. As with the usual exercises, the complexity of the question is adjusted based on your previous answer.

All of these features serve one purpose: to create a course that will satisfy the learner. If the exercises are too easy, there is a fair chance that the person will want to drop out or just abandon the course. The same thing can happen if the exercises are too difficult. This is why finding the golden middle is so important and AI can help achieve that.

6. More Accurate Grading

This is not the biggest issue we are facing right now, but grading is still a matter worth mentioning when it comes to the education process. AI technologies will enable us to have more accurate grading that will reflect the capabilities of the students more precisely.

AI technologies will have a less biased look at the answers provided by students on the exam and will be able to give more accurate estimates. Grading is still a painful topic for many students and educators who often claim it to be an inaccurate reflection of the true capabilities of the students.

7. Online Research

Last but not least, AI will help us conduct better online research for various studies. This relates both to the teachers who want to improve their methods of education and to the students who are writing their research papers.

For instance, there is the Defined STEM digital resource which can already help you in many ways when it comes to education and online research. And that is just one example of the numerous online resources that AI technologies can use to assist you in research.

Final Thoughts

All in all, Artificial Intelligence will generally have a positive impact on the education process, and we will see improvements in our system. However, we need to understand the challenges and risks that come with such changes and be prepared for them.