I was inspired by a recent blog post from Alberto Arenaza and it prompted me to think more deeply about how AI will impact education. Despite the fact that EdTech has done little to significantly improve learning efficiency or student autonomy, I’m an optimist about the potential of AI in education. Whereas EdTech made incremental improvements through the digitization of some aspects of the learning workflow, AI will (eventually) provide major leaps that can’t be ignored. AI will accelerate Learning Engineering, which is taking a systematic view of learning and using data to make learning more efficient for each learner. Efficiency comes from adjusting the learning activities, content, and assessments to engage students deeply.
The strength of the teacher-student relationship is directly related to student achievement. Initially, teachers will be wary of the recommendations made by AI learning systems. One way to build credibility could be for the AI to help lessen the feedback load on teachers. The AI could identify student work products that need the most/least attention from the teacher and student work products that can be peer-reviewed. These systems will only win over teachers to the extent that their recommendations are as good (or better) than the teacher AND there is a way to understand the basis of the recommendations.
