Four examples of how artificial intelligence is used in education
Robots can’t replace teachers, but they can help grade papers and individualise lesson plans.
Today, we will look at another area, namely education. Here, too, artificial intelligence has and will have great applications. Here are some examples.
You may remember this from your student days, or if students follow me, they will know it first-hand. You’re taking on new learning. Some students grasp it in a few minutes and get bored in class, others don’t catch up and don’t decipher the new material at all. In other lessons, the tables may turn. Those who couldn’t keep up are now on top and vice versa. There is nothing wrong or abnormal about this. Each of us has a knack for something different. Somewhere nature has given, somewhere else it has taken away. I, for example, am quite good with computers. However, when it comes to practical skills, things don’t look rosy for me. The problem is not the pupils, the problem is the school system. It treats all students the same. This is partly because of tradition, partly because of capacity; there simply aren’t enough teachers, let alone enough to treat everyone individually. This is what artificial intelligence has the potential to change.
Indeed, artificial intelligence is arbitrarily scalable. Each pupil would be assigned a virtual teacher, either a computer programme or a phone app. The virtual teacher will, first of all, build a detailed knowledge profile of the pupil. They will know what the student enjoys, what they are not so keen on, what they excel at, i.e. what they are good at and what they are not good at, so to speak. Based on this, the virtual teacher can build a personalised learning plan for the pupil in question, supporting them in every way possible. In this way, it would be possible to discover talents early on and develop them. Humanity can thus look forward to a knowledge expansion of unprecedented proportions.
Despite the fact that the teaching profession is not very appealing from a financial point of view, I think that most teachers love their job. They love to watch their students develop intellectually and personally. But, as in any job, there are activities in the teaching profession that are not so rewarding. I would venture to include grading among them. There are sometimes dozens of pupils in a class and a teacher is responsible for several classes. When the test period comes around, he or she may have to grade hundreds of tests in the evenings. Fortunately, artificial intelligence comes to the rescue. Thanks to character recognition and natural language processing technologies, it will be possible to automate this routine activity. Test results would be known virtually as soon as the test is completed. Teachers will have considerably less work to do at home, but students will also benefit from this situation.
