Technology has made a breakthrough in almost all the sectors like retail, forestry, banking, healthcare, and even sports. The only sector that still follows the conventional method is the education sector.
We can find the students in school performing monotonous activities irrespective of their skills. This results in a stagnant situation, where the students can’t progress further. AI can change this method prevailing in schools today.
Usage of AI in the education sector
The education sector is slowly adapting AI into its field. One evidence is that K-12 schools in the United States have started using AI. It helps the K-12 teachers and the administrative people in their daily activities.
Others having a plan to incorporate Artificial intelligence into their educational projects or simply want to know how AI can influence education can have a closer look at the below details
Personalized learning with AI
AI and ML (Machine Learning) are capable of taking education to greater heights via personalized learning. The major idea behind this personalized learning is that it can cater to the students’ preferences like content adjustment and learning pace. This can be perfectly achieved with the help of Artificial intelligence.
AI captures and analyzes huge amounts of data to generate accurate learning profiles of students. As time goes by, students take up various assignments, attend tests, take part in classroom activities, and many more. Without technology none of these is possible. AI proves to be different since forgetting is impossible here. AI can compile the entire data corresponding to a student and provide suggestions to the teacher showing them the way to create improved personalized materials for the students.
It is a pure advantage to use AI in the education sector. It has the power to eliminate the conventional standardized approach to education since its no longer effective. With personalized learning coming into play, each student can approach education uniquely where their preferences and learning abilities are met.
Artificial intelligence can make the student the center of the education process with the availability of personalized content at the correct pace.
Online education with AI
Outdated, expensive, incoherent – these are the words used by most modern students to describe the existing conventional educational system. They prefer modern learning ways, personalized content, and assurance to get a most sought-after job once they graduate.
AI may not end the search for jobs in the future, but it might be able to provide suitable content as per the students’ preferences.
The incorporation of AI in education paves way for the increase of economical choices. Online universities and schools are working on making education affordable to everyone. As per the post-pandemic forecast, experts vouch that Blended learning will increase to a greater extent. One can assume that universities and colleges affected by the pandemic might shut down or resort to online education. To make this transition a smooth and easy process, academic persons can rely on remote education platforms and numerous education applications driven by Artificial intelligence.
Several experts predict that the pandemic will bring a change in education in the coming years. Remote learning will no longer remain as an option but will be the keystone of education.
Automation in classrooms with AI
Grading and evaluation are two of the most unnerving tasks in education. Artificial intelligence reduces the education professional’s load in these two areas. This allows the educators to concentrate more on students’ activities.
The advantages of AI do not stop here and have more to offer. Scheduling and planning can be automated with the help of AI thereby eliminating manual preparation of timetables. AI aids the educators to minimize their work pressure by offering them schedules without clashes and also delivering content as per the deadlines.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
VR (Virtual Reality) is taking the education sector to greater heights. This technology is developed to garner students’ attention and improve their learning ability. VR technology paves way for interactive and lively learning for students of all ages.
One example to showcase the impact of VR technology in education is its usage in K-12 schools on a wide scale. It is a successful method to improve the communication skills of students. In addition to this, VR technology can be used largely to aid autistic kids.
Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can’t withstand a noisy environment and tend to separate themselves from educators and classmates. VR technology takes the kids to a virtual world where they can explore a variety of concepts in their safe zone and also hone their required skills.
The US Department of Education has taken the initiative to resort to VR for helping children with ASD to develop their social skills. The primary objective of this initiative is to educate the kids with Autism regarding the positive and negative communications in a lighter environment and enable them to identify social prompts at a higher pace.
Another involvement of AI in the education sector is Augmented reality (AR). As per the Common sense Census, 53% of the children aged 11 years contain a smartphone. 84% of the children don’t stop with games or youtube but also get involved in other activities.
Augmented reality can turn a boring class into an engaging one thereby garnering students’ attention. Students develop good teamwork abilities and become more informative through these interactive learning processes.
Face recognition systems
Face recognition feature – another development in technology provides an innovative method to track the attendance of students. It is a subfield of AI.
There are numerous face recognition apps developed currently to recognize the students’ faces and mark their attendance. The students’ information is cross-checked in the database.
Another advantage is the generation of multiple reports by the system that can keep both the faculty and the trainers on the same page. The necessity to call students by their names during attendance or marking attendance manually has been eliminated due to the development of Face recognition technology.
NLP in classrooms
Natural language processing (NLP) falls under Machine Learning that is employed to analyze real-time sentiments and come up with valuable information derived from this data.
NLP techniques, as well as tools, have proved effective to understand the emotions and interpret the sentiment of the message. NLP-based emotional detection system helps to identify emotions like anger, happiness, confusion, etc. The guiding process can also be streamlined resulting in it being fair and efficient.
Another usage of NLP in the education sector is the linkage of internal maps of the world based on NLP. The major objective of using these maps is to try out the maximum number of learning methods available and then to incorporate them into the learning methods. Usage of NLP techniques inside the classroom will lead to an efficient and engaging learning process.
Investment of AI in education
China has regularly been hugely investing in education. As per the statistics, China spent a whopping amount of 1 billion dollars on Artificial intelligence education.
Squirrel AI an Edtech startup in China aims to bring personalization and one-to-one support to kids from K-12 to higher educations. Another project is AIo7 targeting young people learning English. This project contains interactive videos, engaging games to encourage the imagination of kids thereby developing their talents.
The US is next in line with China when it comes to investing in the education sector. The country has a huge number of AI firms. Incorporating AI into education, they aim to bridge the learning gaps, deliver content and help the students with personalized learning methods.
Drawbacks of AI in education
As the saying goes, “Every coin has two sides”, AI also has its own disadvantages. The major one is its biased nature. How? This is because algorithms in AI are talented to give marks for content like essays but not that smart to interpret the meaning of those contents. One way to overcome this drawback is to allow humans to decide on the final grade for these essays.
Apart from these, there are also the following drawbacks:
1. AI cannot replace teachers entirely because it does not teach important social skills.
2. It is dependent entirely on the internet and hence can become an obstacle to implement in countries with slow internet connectivity.
3. It is very expensive to develop and implement.
Conclusion
AI plays a vital role in the education sector right from K-12 to adult learning by providing interactive, efficient education. It even reduces the work pressure of the educators, but don’t even consider AI replacing teachers. It can only be considered as your digital assistant in the classroom environment and not as an educator.
