Artificial intelligence in education. Why people seek for innovation in learning
AI for education: new experience for users, more profit for services.
Global self isolation has made people all over the world shift to remote learning. This process was not smooth for everyone. Today we’re going to talk about the benefits that artificial intelligence is able to provide for educational services as well as about future changes in the educational process.
Why were many people unable to study from home efficiently? Recent survey held by Center for competencies in online education and digital corporate learning EdCrunch revealed that 72% of children get distracted and study less efficiently without teacher’s control. Additionally, 29% mentioned technical problems with educational platforms performance, resulting in complete loss of motivation for the student.
Group learning is not always efficient as well. It doesn’t matter if we talk about primary school, higher education or refresher courses, students’ level in the end is different. A teacher can not pay attention to everyone.
That is why people, who have knowledge gaps or lack self discipline, just tune out and miss a part of the course, so that some end up less qualified than others. And although everyone gets the same diploma and certificates, some people graduate with less knowledge and insufficient skills. It’s no surprise that they give negative feedback on the educational process.
Artificial intelligence allows changes in the approach to teaching increasing the level of students’ engagement. Implementing advanced technologies, education platforms and organizations can become more appealing to the potential students and increase the profit. People will be more motivated to pay for this type of education as well, as “smarter” education will provide absolutely different experiences for everyone.
Personal approach
The biggest problem of every education is its universality. When an education program is good for everyone it is actually good for no one in particular. Artificial intelligence allows you to customize the program for each student taking a lot of characteristics into consideration. Among the parameters for choosing a curriculum may be the data about previously taken tests, information about interests and social status, results of previous classes, psychological portrait etc.
For example, we are currently working on an educational project, it’s a Landscape design school. After analyzing the customers for several months their psychological portraits will be created. Based on this data personalized courses recommendations are to be formed. Constant learning of the neural network will allow us to make these recommendations more and more precise day by day, as well as to identify new requests of the customers in order to assure optimal development of the platform. We are currently developing a personalized SDK for this partner so that the company could benefit the most from AI implementation.
Belgium has shown the most large-scale AI implementation in public education. Last year the administration of the Flemish region signed a contract with AI platform Century Tech. 700 Belgian schools will be equipped with personalized learning systems. Using neurophysiology and processing a wide spectrum of data the system will select sets of customized mini-lessons for students who still have some topics they struggle with. It is evident that the results of this kind of education will be better.
The most relevant education
One more educational problem is knowledge obsolescence. It is typical for higher education institutions whose students are supposed to “forget everything they’ve learned” when starting a job. But for private educational services it can also be challenging to deal with the increasing amount of information and fast development of the modern connected-society.
As Mark van Rijmenam, a visionary and an ideologist of technologies processing big amounts of data and working with machine learning, claims in his interview to RBK, technically artificial intelligence is able “to build up an entire learning process for a student from scratch. As a teacher it reminds more of a coach who helps the student to frame accurate questions and analyze them properly”. Despite the fact that it sounds surreal now, within some time AI will undertake educational programs updating, their development and improvement in compliance with the latest market needs.
Even now AI implementation lets us explore users’ preferences and analyze their behavior. Involving in this process different data from various sources, including social networks and industrial media, AI may give prompt recommendations on education programs update, as well as help educational projects to build the Road Map and develop in the direction that the clients expect them to.
Personal interaction
It’s great if you can afford having classes with a tutor. But, as experience has proven, usually there are not enough qualified teachers and private classes are quite expensive. Artificial intelligence can come in handy in this situation not only by providing tasks in compliance with a dynamic algorithm but also by monitoring a student’s reaction. An outstanding example of this kind of analysis is usage of video monitoring systems in Chinese schools.
Systems of face identification in classes help evaluate the students’ engagement level. And if the rigorous E-teacher notices that someone fell asleep or was folding paper planes, the student might even get a bad mark.
Control is one thing, and what is normal for China might not be acceptable for other countries. We perceive personal interaction as analyzing students’ emotional state. As every action, moments of reflection or distraction let us assess a student’s satisfaction with the learning process. Applying AI for analyzing the data every educational institution already possesses we can assess the emotional state of every student, find out their preferences, identify the weak sides in the educational process.
Artificial intelligence is capable not only to provide personalized recommendations and create customized curriculum but also to involve a real teacher when needed. A professional based on the machine observations will be able to adapt the learning process, to talk to the user in order to solve their problem promptly or give some advice. “If we apply AI in order to understand how the student came up with this answer or solution, it’ll give us more than the answer itself”, Mark van Rijmenam pointed out.
Reliability and control
During the coronavirus pandemic taking exams from home has become the norm. But it has also led to many problems related to cheating. AI helps solve all trust issues for good using the basic algorithms. It is impossible for the examiner to watch every examinee. But using a web camera you can easily monitor the actions of the student setting up some red flags. Many companies already use trusted algorithms to monitor where the student is looking during the exam, to detect any suspicious activity, e.g. looking up the answers in a textbook or a smartphone or asking other people to help.
Implementation of this analytical system will allow educational institutions to offer degrees that can be entirely completed online as it will be possible to guarantee that the students passed their exams by themselves. Monitoring features, applied under mutual consent and when needed, let you economize a lot of resources guaranteeing, at the same time, a precise assessment of students’ knowledge. By the way, the system called Nestor, which analyzes student’s behavior via webcam, microphone and desktop, has been used in some French universities for several years already.
Artificial intelligence is a new type of education
There is no surprise that implementation of AI has great potential in the education field. As, eventually, education itself is the process of receiving information. And information is essential for AI. We can already observe the customization of the learning process for every student based on AI. Of course, there are no universal approaches. But here in SmartCoders we love solving challenging tasks helping our customers not only with AI implementation but also with data collection process automation.
Taking into consideration that scientists all over the world keep on working on more effective implementation of machine learning in the educational process, new ideas and interesting solutions, which we are going to implement with our partners, are waiting for us. This will bring a wide range of benefits to the users and will also make learning more comfortable and more affordable as It won’t require so many people and so much manual work anymore. Thus, within some time people will no longer opt for the “old-fashioned” ways of learning as it will be more expensive and less efficient. That’s why educational companies should really start considering data collection from their sites and portals for further analysis and AI implementation.
