AI in Education – Threat or Treat?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm and is rapidly transforming so many industries and education is no exception. The integration of AI in education has the potential to completely turn how we learn on its head. However, although the benefits are great, concerns are also springing up amongst education professionals about AI’s impact on the industry.
Let’s begin by looking at the benefits of AI being used in education.
- Personalised Learning: AI can personalize and tailor learning materials to suit and meet the needs of all students. Due to this learning can be more effective since students would be able to focus on certain areas which they need to improve on. Feedback can be instantaneous which will allow for quicker performance improvement.
- Accessibility: AI can provide remote and online learning opportunities which can be quite helpful to anybody living in remote areas. Access to course work can be at any time, day or night and students can learn based around their own unique schedule.
- Curriculum: AI can quickly generate curriculum content for educators which will mean teaching staff can spend more time teaching and less time researching and putting materials together.
- Human Bias: AI can work to reduce bias in education.
These are some benefits of AI, but as we all know not everything is always rosy and there are negative impacts of AI in education.
- Teachers: There is a fear that AI can replace human teachers, even though that could possibly be true, AI could never replace human touch, AI could never create a positive, creative and supportive learning environment like a good teacher can.
- Critical Thinking: AI could suppress critical thinking which is often an important skill taught in further and higher education and as a result stifle student’s thinking power overall.
- Human Interactions: AI limits our interpersonal connections and communications which is quite high up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
- Digital Divide: Due to socio-economic reasons, AI may not be available to all who would like to use it.
- Integrity: An issue that further and higher education has been battling with for many decades and with the recent development of ChatGPT by OpenAI, the education industry has another battle to face of potential plagiarism which is not impossible, but quite difficult to detect.
Like most things in life, AI in education has its pros and cons. It’s extremely important to target the negatives and work on improvements in these areas. Additionally, it’s important to invest in training teachers to fully understand the AI systems so that they can use it effectively in their teaching.
Ultimately, AI is as good as the people behind it and the people that use it. It can significantly improve how we learn and teach and make education accessible for all.
And finally, as we touch on ChatGPT and if you are still not sure if it is as great and powerful as people make it out to be, ask yourself this – was this blog written by AI software like ChatGPT or just by a very skilled copywriter?
Joe Walsh
Director
The Open College