AI innovation is threatening to disrupt how we live our lives, and that includes how we educate our children, but will it be to their benefit? The mention of AI heralds mixed responses. Understanding how we can harness the power of AI for good is increasingly important. So much so that the impact of Artificial Intelligence on education is one of the main topics being discussed at this year's Tutors’ Association National Conference. As a teacher and tutor, having been fortunate enough to help educate hundreds of young people, there is one fundamental ingredient that I believe must remain integral to successful learning, and that is human interaction. The relationship between student and teacher, and the interplay that takes place through fruitful discussion and successful questioning, is where impactful learning is fully realised.
There is a real challenge that faces classroom teachers, at a time when, in many schools, class sizes are becoming woefully inflated. With multiple students of varying proficiencies in a subject, how do teachers identify how well every individual student is learning at each point during a lesson? Too often, a general sense of a class’s understanding ends up being relied upon by teachers in these situations. New technology companies, such as AI-driven CENTURY Tech, are working to use AI and machine learning in order to address this issue and further personlise learning. In some schools, activities on computer programmes are used in lessons to generate data on how well students have understood each topic. In the school setting and as a homework aid to consolidate learning, this is a useful tool. It is very possible that data-generating AI technologies could help teachers provide more individually-tailored personalised learning in a classroom setting, but is there a danger of over-reliance on this technology? Learning, and individual students, are so much more than sets of data.
That’s why one to one tutoring has such value. Compared to a classroom setting, the tutor’s continuous attention to an individual student’s level of success, and ability to grasp and understand new learning, is very high.
Taking technology-enhanced education a step further, there’s a growing discussion around whether robots can be useful tools for teaching social skills to children. University College London are at the forefront of this debate with on-going research into the use of social robots, named Zeno, for autism education. The idea being that Zeno will help teach children to understand how to read facial expressions and emotions.
These new AI-powered initiatives are surely useful tools to aid educators, if used wisely, discerningly, and, perhaps, sparingly. In an increasingly technology-driven world, what value do we place on the nurturing of individuality, creativity and the role of human communication? While robot educators might carry a certain novel appeal, and may prove proficient at teaching students a basic grounding in a set of skills, we cannot lose sight of the integral role that human interaction plays as the genesis of a new idea, concept or learning takes root in a child’s mind. Would a tech-reliant system of education mean the wonder goes out of learning? And in the words of John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, ‘with the wonder the deep understanding’.
Written by Alice Coubrough
