This is a guest post by; Name: Samuel Alfie,
It is easy to observe that the way children are taught today has changed a lot compared to 20 and 30 years ago, especially in terms of the tools used. Digitization is entering into classrooms, right from Kindergarten to high school and institutions of higher education.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the biggest driving forces for this change. Artificial intelligence in education is drastically modifying teaching and assessment techniques across all levels. According to research by Research and Markets, AI market in the US education sector is expected to grow by 47.7% between 2018 and 2022.
There are AI-powered tools designed to assist teaching in specific ways for the overall betterment of teachers and students. From providing adaptive learning to helping students to finish academic tasks by merely speaking to a computer, AI is directing the future of education around the world.
Let’s take a look at the role of AI in education and the different ways it’s changing the landscape of the industry altogether:
- Speech recognition in education
- Adaptive learning
- AI tutoring
- Smart content in schools
- Automate grading system
Speech Recognition in Education
AI can help students struggling with writing. For example, Nuance is a company that develops AI software for speech recognition in education. The company’s product, Dragon, is one such software which enables students, as well as educators, to type without actually typing. Dragon allows people to speak the words that are then displayed on the screen.
This software helps in creating written content in a number of MS Office applications like Word, Excel, and Outlook. It not only helps struggling students in doing their assignments but in doing so, it also leads to their confidence getting boosted. In fact, Dragon can be used universally in classroom education for overall improved efficiency in working on various academic assignments.
Adaptive Learning
One of the rising requirements of modern education is to personalize learning as much as possible. At its core, this concept is quite old and has always been recognized as one of the major concerns of classroom teaching. A group, by its nature, doesn’t seem to provide the right setup for individualized teaching and learning. But this is now changing, thanks to technology.
Adaptive learning software help teachers in understanding the gaps in a student’s performance by adapting to the individual capability of learning. For example, Knewton’s Alta is a courseware tool designed to help teachers and students in working on assignments through adaptive learning. With every interaction between a student and Alta, it would learn and adapt to each student’s proficiency in learning, analyze any gaps in their knowledge and hence, will accordingly adjust the progression of the assignment. One of its primary objectives is to enable students to master a certain assignment by the time it is finished.
AI Tutoring
In AI-related discussions, it is often anticipated how this technology will impact human jobs. Will it ever replace humans entirely? Regardless of what you and I may feel about it, AI is totally capable of replacing humans in a number of tasks. And that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.
In education, there are ways that AI is helping teachers in tutoring students, reducing human workload in the overall teaching process. For example, Cognii Virtual Learning Assistant is a virtual tutoring assistant designed for having educational conversations with students. It evaluates writing and provides an accurate assessment with the help of open response questions (instead of multiple-choice questions).
Smart Content in Schools
Reading a book is old-school, in a good way, and even nostalgic especially if you pick one up that you read a couple of decades back. But the trend is changing with digitization happening all around us.
Smart content is about converting typical textbooks into customized digital content and its potential is being realized in schools. Content Technologies Inc, for example, is a company creating AI-powered tools that enable smart content. Its Cram101 tool uses AI to divide books into small segments of informational content. These segments of content are further assisted by their own chapter summaries, true-false questions, as well as multi-choice questions. The idea is to enable easier learning of textbooks by converting them into smart content.
Automate Grading System
Grading is a vital process in determining a student’s performance. It is also critical in forming feedback and ways of improvement when necessary. That said, grading can often be a tedious task when teachers have to check a bundle of exam papers.
AI can help change that. Automating the grading system with the help of artificial intelligence is capable of nearly simulating the correctness of human grading. For example, GradeCam is a grading tool which uses handwriting recognition to help provide accurate assessment. What’s more, it can read signs like periods, slashes and hyphen. Besides telling whether an answer is correct or not, it is capable of telling if it needs reviewing.
Given that AI is a new and radical technology, there is a lot of curiosity and excitement around it, and the same goes for educators and students. People are talking about on various platforms, from face to face interaction to joining public discussion threads & forums online. AI is helping teachers answer a lot of education questions globally.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t only intended to simulate human behavior, it is being developed to provide smart applications and solutions at various scales. Education is one sector which can make use of AI to improve the overall quality of teaching and learning by enabling educators and students to get customized and adaptive learning solutions.
Author Bio: Samuel Alfie is a blogger at ProProfs Discuss, the #1 Q&A website with millions of wisdom seekers collaborating to ask questions and get the best answers. He loves reading and writing about a variety of topics including e-learning, e-commerce, science, philosophy, pop culture, travelling, digital media, and more. With a knack for writing, enthusiasm for research and an editorial mindset, he loves creating content that resonates with the audience.