How will AI change education?
In recent years, most students in Norwegian schools have their own digital devices, either a PC, iPad, or Chromebook, all equipped with different types of software. A lot of the software makes use of artificial intelligence. What challenges does it present for school and learning?
I just attended this interesting seminar arranged by the University of Oslo, FIKS, the united where I have been engaged in a 20 % position the past few years. The time was divided between researchers from the university level in Norway, and Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
I thought it was interesting to listen to Jason Morales talk about the use of AI and Microsoft Teams.
Googling Joson Morales I discovered his podcast on the topic; “Ideate: Rethinking Data and Ai in Education”. You can find more about it here: Welcome to a brand new Microsoft podcast called Ideate: Rethinking Data and Ai in Education. Co-hosts Jason Morales and Emily Kotecki will bring you monthly conversations with leaders from K-12, higher education, and edtech. Each episode will explore how guests foster innovation in their organizations using data and artificial intelligence.
Experts see AI as accelerating rapidly now, and more intense and widespread impacts will soon become prevalent. One set of factors driving the acceleration is not specific to education. For example, AI has become a core part of our cell phone technology and home assistants, allowing us to talk to phones and to use them as personal assistants. Machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning algorithms are ever-increasing in their prevalence in products to support image processing and speech recognition (Richter et al., 2019).
Another set of factors is more specific to education, where research is expanding rapidly. For example, the AI-based fields of learning analytics (e.g., Krumm et al., 2018) and educational data mining (e.g., Fischer et al., 2020; Slater et al., 2017) are engaging many more scholars each year, resulting in a wealth of research findings. In addition, developers are producing applications such as early warning systems (Krumm et al., 2014). These systems detect when a student’s behavior may indicate an increased chance of an undesirable later event, such as dropping out of a course. The capabilities, however, are going beyond observing what students type on a computer or how they answer questions. Newer research-based systems can listen to recordings or watch videos of classrooms, finding events that are significant for learning outcomes (Suresh et al., 2019; Aung et al., 2018). Automated essay scoring is another long-standing application (Page, 2003), which is now rapidly expanding to include assistive systems for peer grading, student collaboration, and other educational applications. More generally, researchers are using AI in ambitious mashups that combine AI technologies with other emerging technologies to produce learning innovations (CIRCL, 2020). These go beyond the most common AI-in-education scenarios to include rigorous performance assessment, virtual reality, voice-based systems, gesture-based systems, social and educational robots, collaborative learning, mobile learning, and more. Source: CIRLS AI report
A 2020 study from Microsoft and McKinsey & Company found the following:
Our current research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of current teacher hours are spent on activities that could be automated using existing technology. That translates into approximately 13 hours per week that teachers could redirect toward activities that lead to higher student outcomes and higher teacher satisfaction. In short, our research suggests that existing technology can help teachers reallocate 20 to 40 percent of their time to activities that support student learning.
Microsoft Teams AI could soon tell you which attendees are most engaged
Microsoft has created a new artificial intelligence tool that will inform Teams users which meeting participants are most engaged. The AI solution, dubbed AffectiveSpotlight, will use a neural network to analyze facial expressions and determine how individuals are responding to the speaker.
Microsoft Teams: Now teachers can monitor students’ reading fluency with AI
Reading Progress will help teachers build students’ confidence and reading fluency at a time when face-to-face contact is less frequent.
Microsoft has rolled out Reading Progress, a free education tool for Teams that gives teachers artificial intelligence (AI) estimations of student performance and errors when reading text.
The Teams app aims to help teachers quickly assess students’ fluency at reading through video and audio recordings
What is the future of AI in the classroom?
So, what does the future hold? There’s no question that if artificial intelligence isn’t already a part of your classroom, it certainly will be in the near future, in whatever form it may take.
What is artificial intelligence in the classroom?
A recent report from Microsoft says that “Artificial intelligence (AI) gives teachers and schools new ways to understand how students are progressing and allows for highly customized, timely, and targeted curation of content.”
So what can AI do? Also known as machine learning, current AI can solve problems and reason for itself by identifying patterns and adapting accordingly.
For example, the flashy technology behind deepfake is actually a form of AI that creates an incredibly realistic copy (virtually undistinguishable from the original) of a famous face and inserts it into a video based on thousands of hours of video footage.
AI for Learning Analytics
If we’ve already established that using AI for essay-grading could revolutionize the amount of work teachers have to take home, what else could it do for learning analytics?
Since AI analyzes and makes predictions based on the information it’s given, every time your students submit work or ask questions online, AI tools can go to work assembling powerful student learning analytics. Source: Edpuzzle