What Does Artificial Intelligence Bring to Educational Practices?
Artificial Intelligence offers the potential for rapid evolution in all aspects of educational practices. Some of the most direct impacts include: freeing teachers from repetitive tasks; and selecting assessment and designing teaching materials based on individual students’ needs, thereby addressing the 2 Sigma problem to some extent.
While AI not yet fully mature, there are many considerations in its application in teaching. Here are two main principles:
- Teaching activity should be centered around students, teachers, and parents. In AI-assisted teaching, the focus should still be on people, meaning the goal is to support teachers in serving students and parents. AI is merely a tool, not a target in any part of teaching.
- Teachers still have the ultimate responsibility in teaching. They are responsible for students’ safety, fairness, privacy, and educational outcomes.
Technical Issues
Forms
With the development of AI and modern information technology, the way people access information has changed drastically, and similar changes have occurred in educational science. For example, keyboard typing has evolved into voice input; text information has transformed into conversational information; and some issues that needed to be resolved face-to-face with teachers can now be addressed through interactions with intelligent models. These changes not only make teaching more diverse and interesting but also familiarize students with human-computer communication methods that are becoming (or will become) common in reality and will be widespread in the future.
Customized Education
AI has significantly advanced the frontier of customized education. Due to the limitations of individual teachers’ energy and capabilities, it is difficult for one teacher to accurately and consistently track multiple students and provide customized education for a large number of students. For instance, in a classroom with 30 students, it is usually hard for a teacher to closely track each student’s learning progress and their understanding of concepts. However, with AI as an assistance, teachers don’t need to remember students’ performances and responses over time, as AI can provide accurate assessments based on its “observations.”
Another important aspect is on homework and assessment. Through AI and information technology, educators can design questions and schedule tasks based on models (e.g., language models based on relevant languages and subjects) and learning patterns (e.g., the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve), and accurately collect feedback on students’ answers. This assists teachers in focusing on student interaction in the classroom, significantly improving the efficiency of teacher-student interactions.
24x7 Service
Information technology and AI have turned educational services into a 24x7 offering. For example, through high-quality educational chatbots, students can interact with the bots at any time, allowing them to chat with the robots anytime they have doubts about their studies. Meanwhile, educators can collect information about students’ interests, questions, and views on knowledge points. This way, students can choose AI-selected questions based on their interests and needs, and AI can adjust the questions in real-time to suit students’ needs, providing a 24x7 service.
More Private Learning Spaces and Opportunities
In most cases, if a teacher is asked five questions in a class, there might actually be 50 questions that students have in the class. Various reasons prevent the other 45 questions from being asked. A major reason is the reluctance to ask questions in public or the perception that the question is too simple to take the teacher’s time, or not finding an opportunity to ask. AI-based customized approaches can overcome these barriers.
Another aspect in the classroom is that when a teacher asks a question, due to time constraints, only a very limited number of students get the opportunity to respond, which limits the teacher’s understanding of the class’s overall learning situation.
Over time, these limitations can accumulate and potentially have a significant negative impact on teaching effectiveness. AI can help address these issues. When interacting with AI, a student may not hesitate to ask simple questions, reducing their anxiety. Similarly, when AI poses a question, the student has the full opportunity to respond without overly worrying about the correctness of their answer, allowing them to perform naturally.
Such a more private learning space can enhance student learning and enable educators to better understand students’ progress.
Challenges
AI is not a panacea and comes with its own set of issues. Here are a few key challenges:
How to Ensure Model Behavior Aligns with Educational Goals
Educational goals often encompass various aspects, some of which are abstract. Refining educational goals and training models on large language bases to better align with those goals present significant technical challenges.
Balancing Teacher Decisions and Machine Decisions
This also concerns the quality of AI-assisted teaching. Teachers can usually make accurate decisions, but it’s time-consuming; model-based decisions are quick but may lack quality, hiding potentially flawed logic and facts under perfect language. Balancing the two is an ongoing issue related to students’ ages, subjects, AI capabilities, and teachers’ energy.
Addressing Data Security and Privacy Issues
The collection and use of data, especially multimedia, voice, and image data, may raise privacy concerns. This requires parental consent and secure storage.