Artificial Intelligence & Education - Shannon Burton

Over the past twenty years, artificial intelligence has become a standard part of our lives. Technology surrounds us, from our phones to our cars and even our refrigerators. Back in the day a lot of classrooms were considered tech-free zones, but today we see AI being used for educational purposes nonstop. Here are a few ways artificial intelligence is changing the way we approach education.

Personalized Learning

Have you ever logged onto Netflix or most other streaming services, and seen the personalized recommendations they give you? That’s AI technology, and that same technology is being used in classrooms to help students learn. One of the big issues is that traditional systems typically try to cater to the middle but it doesn’t serve the students as sufficiently as it could. When we introduce AI into the classroom, teachers are put into a position to perform better because of the personalized recommendations the AI will recommend to each individual. A good example of AI helping students learn is the Carnegie Learning app, which is a program that looks at a student’s unique learning process and adapts the lessons as needed.

Efficiency

One of the biggest upsides of AI in education is how it is and how it can make so many things, such as administrative tasks, much more efficient. An example of this is grading. Teachers tend to dedicate a lot of time to grading, and AI can help reduce that time so they can spend more of it actually engaging with their students. There are programs such as Gradescope, which can grade a student’s paper, asses their answers, and even recognize handwriting. AI can also be used for things such as making seating charts, ordering supplies or even processing paperwork.

Global Learning

AI has changed education by helping to eliminate boundaries around the globe. With the way technology works today, you can learn from almost anywhere at any time. Whether a student is in another country or they’re ill and confined to their bed, we can use AI to help bring the classroom to them. An example would be Presentation Translator, which is a plugin for PowerPoint that will create subtitles while the teacher is speaking. This can be great in helping students who speak a different language, or who have an audio or visual disability.

As time moves onward, artificial intelligence will only grow and with it the benefits it can bring to the education industry. The time when teachers would confiscate phones or when kids would get excited when the teacher would bring out the TV is not as far behind us as you may think, and with all of that changing so much in the past twenty years, it’s not hard to imagine how much AI will evolve in that same span of time.