In recent decades we have seen technology changing our world in any sense: what was considered to be Sci-Fi ten years ago is around us now. But when you ask people which sphere remains outdated, you can hear a lot of complaints about the classroom. Despite new whiteboards and projectors, the schoolrooms of today are strikingly similar to those of 50 years ago. Students sit in a room together, listen to the same explanation and complete the same lessons with little variations no matter their learning styles or mastery. Some students are left behind, while others are bored and unmotivated.
AI is believed to be exactly the remedy to change this. The explosion in cheap computing power, development in algorithms, and the increase of available data are making possible new, sophisticated tools to teach children in a more personalized way. Yet, the school resists. In this post, we’ll try to explore the benefits and the risks of introducing AI in the classroom
1. Personalized and Customized Learning: It is probably the most famous argument for Artificial Intelligence, since AI can let children choose everything: the learning pace, the curriculum, the form of education, and the educator. By using predictive computing, AI can learn students’ habits and propose the most efficient study schedule for them. On the other hand, AI can give teachers a better understanding of how their students learn and allows them to collect insights about every student they teach, develop an individualized approach, and handle even the toughest kids easier.
2. Adaptive Group Formation: No class is truly homogeneous: there are always more and less academically inclined kids. By analyzing learner information, AI can generate groups whose motivation or skills are particularly suited to a certain task, or groups that balance one learner’s weaknesses with another learner’s strengths.
3. 24/7 response: Every person has a biorhythm and the brain function of larks and night owls differ. But at a traditional classroom, all students are equal before morning hours. Moreover, they cannot contact teachers whenever we need an answer to a question or suddenly “feel like studying”. AI doesn’t need to take breaks, it doesn’t get annoyed because someone called at 1 am, so everyone can contact a virtual tutor whenever he needs academic assistance. Virtual humans like avatars, digital assistants or chatbots are cost efficient and can work all day round, seven days a week in repetitive and time-consuming tasks no human enjoys doing.
4. Virtual Reality Learning: Speaking about the virtual world, VR-assisted learning allows for educational support in authentic environments and extends the boundaries of the classroom. Students can visit places we’ve never been to, do something we’ve never done and get closer to things they learn about — space and nature, complex projects and concepts.
5. Learning for all: The challenge of education is tough for every child, but it gets even more severe for kids with special needs or children of emigrants. They have to cope with the learning process, the environment they learn in, their community and the lifestyle. AI programs that augment the educational experience for the disabled are already in development by companies like Facebook and are aimed at granting learners with special needs a greater sense of autonomy. At the same time, AI-driven machine translation projects try to bridge the language gap for many second language students that is a possibility to foreign students to understand their teacher in real time.
6. New methods of teaching: If other points concern class management and organization, this concerns real innovations in pedagogy. Game learning with the help of bots, Intelligent Tutoring Systems that challenge and support learners using different algorithms, intelligent moderation and real-time problem solving are just a few examples of new concept of the learning process that can disrupt the traditional classroom.
7.Assistance to teachers. AI can help teachers be more effective and efficient in their work in several ways. For example, they can outsource grading to specialized apps sparing a large portion of their time. Besides, AI can improve the course and the relevant textbooks by analysing patterns in which a large number of students submit wrong answers to the same questions and attracting teachers’ attention to such areas of improvement.
8. Increasing tech experience for students. These days, technology is needed in every professional activity and the importance of acquiring STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills grows. So, it’s better that children start learning to use it as early as possible. The use of artificial intelligence shows the power of tech and coding and might encourage schoolchildren to proceed with learning STEM.
Obviously, all developments come at a certain cost and usually entail falls in other areas. Bringing Artificial Intelligence to classroom may not be always beneficial for schools and learners and their families.
1. Cost: The challenge that schools face immediately is the high cost of the new technology. When combining the cost of installation, maintenance and repair, as well as the cost of power consumed by new robot teachers, it becomes clear that AI is expensive.
2. Lack of personal bond: It may be true that smart machines have more information and this information is more trustful and recent than that of human teachers. However, educators are not just keepers of knowledge, they give children personal guidance, influence their worldview and lead them by example. Substituting personal interaction with machine-based education can lead to educational oversights that hurt learners more than help.
3. Children’s ability to learn from a virtual assistant is still unclear. The biggest open question is whether students will be motivated enough to study when teachers are not there to supervise.The teacher is a central figure during the formative years, and sometimes it’s the wish to impress a teacher that makes a kid eager to master the subject. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is the teacher who embodies the power and makes a reluctant child learn. How will children react to the absence of such a person in their life?
4. The attention span and the ability to multitask reduces. New technology shortens human attention span, as research suggests. We use so much help from machines that our own abilities shrink. By introducing more machines at school, there is a great risk that children will become so used to relying on AI that their abilities to multitask or to focus will get even smaller.
Artificial Intelligence is quite often depicted as an evil power able to ruin the Earth and wipe away mankind. Though it is an artistic exaggeration, AI can lead to societal shifts, including those at the classroom, that are quite harmful and even dangerous.
1. Unemployment: At present, teaching is one of the biggest professional branches. Therefore, if we replace teachers with machines, it will create less of a demand for human educators and, consequently, it will lead to high unemployment and protests. Just remember the times of the industrial revolution when people were replaced by machines with same functions there were strikes and wars.
2. Addiction: We know that our reliance on machines can lead to technology addiction. A school is traditionally a place where children dump their mobile phones and get to open a traditional book. With tech implemented in every classroom, kids can become too used to having their devices always ready for them. As a result, we can end up with a bunch of socially-unadapted technology-addicted adults in several decades.
3. AI-based power: The sad truth is that the power belongs to those who have means to control our minds. Even without thinking of possible biases fed to learners by the officially distributed software, there is always a risk that someone hacks the code and gains the power of spreading violent, inappropriate information and propaganda.
4. Widening of the rich-poor gap: At the early stages of AI conquering the classroom, bots and other AI learning tools will require a student to have a tablet or a laptop. Of course, nowadays not every child has these gadgets, so having AI will become a privilege of the rich. However, it is believed that with the development of new technologies, robots and AI will become more common, while having a human tutor will be a luxury.
5. Mind control: This time, quite literal. Chinese high schools are currently busy introducing technology that either scans students’ faces every 30 seconds or read their brainwaves, looking to see if students are paying attention or losing interest. Besides from being stressful and innervating to the children and probably disrupting their joy of learning, AI-powered tools also run the risk of creating classroom-based, mini-surveillance states.
Despite having great benefits for schools and success in other spheres and industries, AI hasn’t made huge inroads into schools yet. That is partially due to how conservative the field is compared to other areas and due to the limited resources. However, the biggest obstacle might be the concern over the influence AI might have on children.
In this sense, introducing AI at school can be compared with the decades-long debates over the GMO: recent studies might have proved it safe, but the prejudice remains on agenda. Yet, it is a cheaper option, and it is often the price (and laziness) that underlies our choices and pushes us forward. So, once AI outbeats a human teacher in cost-efficiency, we all will welcome robots at our schools — for better or for worse.
