When the average lay person hears the word “Artificial Intelligence”, they conjure up fantasies of entities such as the androids from the movie “Ex Machina” or “The Terminator”; automatons that look and act human yet are far advanced in terms of mental faculty or other skills. While an interesting thought to consider, unfortunately AI or artificial intelligence is not yet capable of producing results that aesthetically right now. In essence, right now we are able to use AI to create machines which can somewhat mimic the human thought process, but not perfectly.

Within the past few years, AI has seen a boom in popularity amongst organizations looking to fine-tune their work in order to increase their efficiency. Sectors like electronics, ecommerce, health and many more have benefited from the use of artificial intelligence in their processes. Many AI services providers are working with mobile app developers on building based apps for a variety of clients from different industries, designed either to increase the efficiency of that business, or provide a more adaptive experience to the business’s customers.

Considering the impact on education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators are now looking into the efficacy of integrating artificial intelligence in education, in order to allow students as well as the educators to find ways to deliver quality education in such hard times.

While the majority of the users may not realize it, the majority of devices we use daily are integrated with artificial intelligence. Voice assistants such as Siri or the Google assistant are the prime examples of AI which are used to enhance our daily lives. They became so popular that devices such as the Amazon Echo were developed specifically to provide personal assistance services to the home.

Previously, the education sector was reluctant to integrate AI with teaching due to concerns about the effectiveness of such systems. But the successful use of AI being used to advance high risk industries have convinced them to try it. The AI education start-up named Liulishuo has even successfully developed a fully autonomous AI based English teacher which uses deep learning algorithms to provide a customized learning experience for each user. Similarly, there has been ongoing research on AI in education on how might it be feasibly integrated into the curriculum, and they have found multiple avenues where AI can be successfully integrated, such as:

• Help improve teaching methods
• Allow personalization of syllabus according to student needs
• Simplify grading and conducting tests
• Make conducting online examinations secure and transparent
• Make AI a part of school curriculum

Let’s discuss these in detail.

Help improve teaching methods:

It is a known fact that when teaching, the one size fits all methodology does not apply to teaching methods. While a method may work for one topic or a group of students, chances are it may not be the correct choice for others.

Nowadays during the pandemic, when the majority of institutions are relying on remote learning, educators are finding out that physical classroom methodologies are not being very effective.

To counter this, educators can rely on AI to provide feedback and suggestions to help improve the techniques, as well as provide reports about where each student is lacking so that the teacher can help them work on it.

Allow personalization of Syllabus according to student needs: 

Extending the previous point, AI provided reports about the students’ performance can allow the teacher to adapt the curriculum according to what the students require. Instead of following a set curriculum which may not be beneficial to the students, AI enabled teaching applications can help teachers design a fluid curriculum that does what it is supposed to – help students understand the content better.

It can also be helpful by automatically suggesting additional links and platforms personalized according to the topics a student may be struggling in, by evaluating their performance in the assessments.

Simplify grading and conducting tests:

On average, teachers spend around twelve hours a week on grading tests and assignments. Using AI, we can simplify that task so that the time can be spent being actually productive.

There are many AI based solutions which allow instructors to both conduct and grade quizzes and examination accurately and most importantly, impartially. Allowing teachers to use such tools can simplify their tasks and allow them to concentrate better on teaching students, rather than performing repetitive tasks that can easily be automated.

Make conducting online examinations secure and transparent:

The risk of cheating or resorting to other dishonest methods to pass an exam is something that needs to be dealt with when we consider online education. People believe that online exams allow for greater opportunities in using these dishonest methods. 

While difficult to address otherwise, AI based features such as facial recognition or voice recognition can help ascertain whether the person solving the exam is the student itself, and combined with other techniques such as plagiarism checkers we can successfully conduct online assessments.

Make AI a part of school curriculum:

Finally, raising awareness about artificial intelligence is only possible by including the topic in the curriculum at the school level. Teaching AI in schools will increase the general awareness regarding the benefits of using AI to improve the entire education structure, just as it has done with sectors such as health. Various research papers on artificial intelligence in education suggest that early introduction to it will also allow students to get interested in the vast field of AI which will have unlimited opportunities to work on in the near future.

In short, artificial intelligence can be used to enhance both the quality of the education as well as the ease with which to disseminate it to the students. By using ready-made solutions or hiring AI app development services to provide a personalized product, educators can enhance the entire learning experience for themselves as well as the students. This pandemic has shown us that conventional methods of learning have become useless for the most part. The need to revamp the structure is at hand, and what better way to do it then to use AI?

Also Read: How Artificial Intelligence Will Revolutionize The Healthcare Industry?