I’ve been keeping up with the dizzying explosion of AI EdTech companies. The current generation of EdTech tools is foundational. That is, these tools generally provide digital versions of analog practices. The next generation of EdTech tools will (hopefully) start to automate aspects of teachers’ workflow so that they can reclaim time to build relationships and facilitate learning activities to deepen and differentiate learning. I am incredibly enthusiastic about the potential of AI in education.
I see a lesson plan battle on the horizon that pits teachers and their manually created lesson plans against the lesson plans created by AI. The initial generation of AI tools will amplify teacher capabilities and assist students with their learning. The lesson planning process is one of the most labor-intensive aspects of teaching and it has largely remained unautomated. Creating a lesson plan generally started from scratch, even though schools have lesson plan repositories and there are online repositories.
There are several companies aimed at facilitating collaboration, automated generation, and supervisory oversight. These tools will make it easier to create lesson plans and manage their frequent adjustments. Imagine a teacher who teaches five sections of a class. Assuming that the school year is 200 days, the teacher needs to manage 1000 blocks of time. And, they still need to create lessons and assignments in some sort of LMS.
At the same time, there are other companies that are aiming to automate the lesson planning process. Currently, these tools can use models of public data (think ChatGPT) to create lesson plans and scale personalization based on topic, perspective, intended audience, and writing style. Over time, these tools will be able to use both public data and internal repositories of digital content (i.e., lesson plans, digital textbooks, curated digital content, etc.). In addition to integrating public and private content, these tools have a major advantage. They are on the verge of populating a range of learning resources for students — LMS lessons, video, chat discussions, and (eventually) AR.
