Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used in education for a long time, usually to do jobs that require human intelligence. Adaptive testing, where questions got tougher and rougher as you kept answering the appropriate questions, was an early memory of AI.
Over the last decade or so computing power has gained leaps and bounds and AI is also getting more evolved to play a larger role in education both for the teacher and learner. Today, Grammarly is a common tool used by many of us which uses AI with natural language processing (NLP) to produce recommendations.
One of the challenges for AI is that a large amount of data is required to run the solutions effectively. According to reports, the use of AI in education is expected to grow annually by 45 percent. The role of AI in the years to come will shape the education industry and the benefit will be for the learner.
Increasing efficiency
One of the basic implantations of AI has been to automate the “operational” activities of teachers. Most teachers spend more than 50 percent of their time on evaluating homework, grading tests, filing paperwork, making a progress report, organising materials and resources for classes, managing teaching materials, etc.
Artificial Intelligence can intervene in many of these tasks to efficiently manage them for the teacher, ensuring that the teacher has more time for higher-order tasks such as teaching & helping out students. This has obvious benefits for both learners and teachers.
Personalisation of classroom experience for the student is another “holy grail” problem that many are trying to solve and are solving. By taking various inputs from the students, platforms can assess the student and give recommendations, these are more like “intelligent tutoring systems” AI can adapt to each student’s level of knowledge, speed of learning, desired goals, analyse learning histories, and a lot of other parameters. This leads to the identification of weaknesses and also course recommendations for improvement, providing a highly personalized learning experience.
Globally, there is a lot of focus on building solutions with AI as the core technology. While the USA leads the development in terms of spending and investments, India ranks sixth (source: The Brookings Institution). We still have a long way to go to get more focus on building solutions in Edtech using Artificial Intelligence.
(This is a slightly modified version of an article originally published in Your Story. The original article can be found at https://yourstory.com/2022/04/artificial-intelligence-edtech-data-personalisation/amp)
