AI and Education: Benefits, Limitations, and Ethical Concerns of AI in Education
The continual improvement and widespread accessibility of new generative artificial intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT have sparked conversations regarding how AI currently shapes and will continue to shape education in the future. This blog post will cover the current role of AI in education, how AI can improve education in the future, as well as limitations and ethical concerns regarding the implementation of AI in education.
What Role Does Educational AI Currently Occupy?
Currently, there are a variety of AI programs targeted toward different educational goals. These educational goals all revolve around improving the learning experience but using different approaches.
STUDENT-FOCUSED EDUCATIONAL AI
The vast majority of educational AI is centered around interacting with and helping students. The most popular type of educational AI directed toward students is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). ITS blends the realms of AI and data science with education to offer students a personalized education by responding to students’ questions in real-time and using a step-by-step approach to help lead students to the right answer. Khan Academy’s new AI tutor Khanmigo, for instance, is an example of an intelligent tutoring system.
Another type of educational AI is educational chatbots that prioritize immediate responses to students’ questions. Educational chatbots can help promptly answer quick and simple questions from students, such as when an assignment is due. These chatbots can also directly engage in teaching students through a dialogue-based tutoring system (DBTS), which is a more specific form of ITS. DBTS prompts students with questions in a Socratic approach rather than simply answering students' questions to ensure that students fully comprehend the material and can change its approach based on the student’s emotional state. Though there aren’t many DBTSs commercially available, many believe that ChatGPT has the capabilities to be a DBTS when used in an ethical and thoughtful manner.
Educational AI also has a lot of potential as a language aid. For instance, AI can be used to help evaluate students’ writing and give feedback or score the students’ writing. This type of evaluative AI is known as automated writing evaluation (AWE). This can be helpful for students to get immediate and specific help with their writing instead of having to wait for their teacher’s suggestions. Educational AI has also been implemented in foreign-language learning efforts. AI can analyze students’ pronunciation, reading, and writing skills in a foreign language to help students improve their ability to communicate in other languages. These kinds of educational AI have already been implemented in applications like Duolingo.
To learn more about ITS, DBTS, AWE, and more, check out the UNESCO guidance book for AI and education.
TEACHER-FOCUSED EDUCATIONAL AI
Some types of educational AI can also help benefit teachers. According to a global teacher and student survey, only 49% of teachers’ working hours are spent interacting with students since teachers spend a lot of time creating curricula, grading, and completing an array of administrative tasks. Educational AI can help relieve teachers from having to complete so much work by automating certain aspects of the educational system, such as by auto-grading student work or answering questions about specific assignment details. This enables teachers to spend time giving students individual support.
Additionally, teachers can also use AI to guide their curriculum. For instance, ChatGPT can help teachers brainstorm project ideas or even practice tests for their classes. ChatGPT can also provide expert knowledge on certain topics to give teachers insight into specific subjects. Khanmigo also allows teachers to track students’ conversations with the Khanmigo AI to see in which areas students are struggling the most. Educational Ai can take student statistics and data to create personalized learner profiles for each student that can also help teachers find out which students need the most support. Thus, educational AI has a lot of potential in filling a teacher’s assistant role to help teachers focus and tailor educational content based on the specific needs of their students.
To learn more about how AI can work alongside teachers, check out the UNESCO guidance book for AI and education.
Benefits of Educational AI
Educational AI has a multitude of benefits over the traditional teacher and classroom educational system.
One of the major ways that educational AI surpasses traditional forms of education is in the accessibility of AI. Traditional education methods are limited by the number of teachers available in an area since students typically require a teacher to learn new material. However, educational AI can be used anywhere as long as the student has access to a digital device and the internet. Thus, educational AI can help increase literacy and education in less developed areas that often have fewer teachers, thus minimizing education disparities around the world. Moreover, teachers typically aren’t available at all hours of the day, so students can’t necessarily get access to direct help if they aren’t able to get in contact with their teacher. Since educational AI is available at all times of the day, it would help make educational resources more available to students when needed.
Furthermore, educational AI can be highly individualized for each student compared to traditional forms of classroom teaching. It can be difficult for students to receive one-on-one help in a classroom setting where teachers have to teach a large group of students. Educational AI can help mitigate this problem since each student can have a personalized experience with the AI model. For example, if one student needs help with multiplication, it can ask the AI for help with a multiplication problem while another student who needs help with parabolas can get targeted answers regarding that topic. In this way, educational AI can help students acquire the resources that they need in order to learn and create a more equitable learning experience.
To learn more about the ways that AI can benefit education, you can check out this interview with a Harvard researcher or this article by Stanford University.
Limitations of Educational AI
While there are many potential benefits to educational AI, there are also several risks associated with educational AI.
For instance, educational AI could harm students’ motivation to learn. Many educational AI models are designed to give quick answers over helping students get to an answer. Thus, students might become accustomed to just transactionally getting information rather than the process of learning. The ubiquitous usage of ChatGPT could further weaken students’ ability to reflect on their own work and think critically as students could use ChatGPT to write their essays for them. This takes away students’ ability to learn from the writing process and understand their own thoughts as well.
Furthermore, educational AI could be trained on biased data for grading and assessing students’ work. When essays are being graded by teachers, it is possible that the teachers’ own implicit biases affect students’ scores, such as giving lower scores to students who come from a racial or gender minority. When these essays, along with their grade “labels,” are fed into an AI model for the AI model to learn from, the educational AI model could unintentionally learn those biases as well. This means that minority students might receive lower scores on their essays because of certain types of vocabulary that they use.
Educational AI also poses a series of privacy and data concerns. It takes a lot of data to create an AI model, so it’s crucial to make sure that no students’ work is being used without consent. Furthermore, educational AI companies could use student information, such as students’ conversations with the educational AI, for commercial purposes, which would also violate students’ privacy. These widespread ethical concerns must be addressed before educational AI is instituted on a larger scale.
For more information on the drawbacks of educational AI, you can read this book by UNESCO, this article by Stanford University, or this report by the Center for American Progress.
Conclusion
AI already plays a significant role in expanding and improving the education sector. As AI continues to improve, there will be an increase in both the number of ways that educational AI can revolutionize education for more individuals and the risks associated with educational AI developments. It’s crucial that our society broadens the conversation regarding educational AI so that more people are aware of the benefits and limitations of this new technology and the necessary regulations can be implemented to ensure that educational AI continues to contribute positively to education.
About Inspirit AI
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