One of the most valuable indicators about teaching quality at universities is the Student-to-Faculty ratio which is the number of students per one member of staff. The lower the number the better because lower number of students enables the tutor to be more focused and give detailed feedback.
Top ranking universities have Student-to-Faculty ratios near to 6, that is one professor for every 6 students. An emerging question now is: can we make up an educational system where the ratio is generally lower than that? can we reach a ratio of 1 where each student has a dedicated professor! Well, this is what AI promises to provide in the field of education.
AI has transformed wide range of industries. Common examples are image recognition, self-driving cars and voice recognition. However, a less popular example is the application of AI in education. This application is growing rapidly and once it kicks in, it will make drastic changes to humans’ intellectual and ability to process and passes information to the upcoming generations.
So, what is the application of AI in education? The answer is: there are a lot of applications. The one that interests me is Personalized Learning.
Personalized Learning
“Personalized Learning is an educational approach that aims to customize learning for each student’s strengths, needs, skills and interests. Each student gets a learning plan that’s based on what he knows and how he learns best.”
In other words, the ultimate goal of personalized learning is to customize the learning experience so that it is most efficient for each student. I agree that human tutor can achieve decent level of personalized learning for a small group of students, However, using AI can push the learning experience beyond the limits that we have ever imagined in all human history.
The main power of AI comes from its ability to give answers to questions that needs extreme observation of gigantic number of students. For example, here are some questions that AI can answer with accuracy more than any tutor can get.
given a particular student:
- • What is the best pace for him/her?
- • What is the best style of learning?
- • What is the best quantity each day?
- • What are the most probable mistakes he/she will make?
- • How many times should he/she revise a concept?
- • How much time is most optimal between revisions?
- • What motivates this student ?
- • What makes him/her focus or get distracted?
- • Is it better for this student to be an early bird or a night owl?
The answers to these questions for each individual is, with no doubt, of a great value that can make him/her get the most out of his learning.
Effects on Society
Any method that improves the learning experience has a positive effect on society. Using AI, however, has its unique positive effects. Let’s see some of them:
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Less years educational systems: Efficient learning will get students ready with the basic skills of markets in less time than usual. It won’t be uncommon to see a 12-year-old students equipped with the knowledge of what was normal to be gained by a 26-year master student before the era of AI!
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Easier access to quality education: Two of the most known barriers of online learning are lack of engagement and the foreign language barriers. Fortunately, AI can solve both of them. The former problem can be tackled by creating smart content that makes the student enthusiastic the whole time of studying. Also, for the language problem, machine translation is now a very hot field that can be used to make courses from all around the world available at all other languages.
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More Flexibility: At the moment of writing this article, the world has been hit hard by the outbreak of the Corona virus. Educational institutes, even the top ones, are facing a great challenge to continue delivering quality education while students are in quarantine. Personalized Learning enhances the online learning experience, hence it aids in facing global challenges like the one we are facing right now. This will also open the doors for distance learning to be an option for all universities’ programs rather than only for few selected ones.
In general, when education is improved, this leads to higher public awareness and faster production by countries which makes for better economy in both short and long terms.
When Will We See These Effects?
It is already happening on small scales. Chat bots are already used in some schools. Also administrative tasks are being automated in some universities. But to see the results that make us “WOW”, we need to wait a little bit more. The obstacle that hinders AI algorithms is the lack of data. Data is like oxygen to AI models, and without it, AI algorithms cannot do its best. unlike applications which have data available right away in mass quantities such as images and sounds, Personal data required for AI application in education is not that much available. So we will have to wait (or better) deliberately collect these data so that AI wheel starts cycling.
In Conclusion …
AI is changing the world rapidly in an unprecedented way in human history. A newly born baby today will almost certainly have different educational system than that was taken by his/her parents.
Similar to any technological breakthroughs, we have the choice to use it for good or bad. You, dear reader, better use it for good, and for making our world a better place.
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