Are you up to speed with educational AI, or floundering in its wake?
By Dr Stephen Whitehead
By Dr Stephen Whitehead
As far as technology is concerned, I’m a late starter.
I wrote my 90,000-word PhD thesis on an electronic typewriter (circa 1993), the screen size equal to five postage stamps. When I got my first full-time academic job (circa 1997), a secretary needed to show me how to start up my office computer.
OK, I’ve since moved on a little. But then, haven’t we all?
The question is, though, are any of us keeping up with technology? I very much doubt it, unless it’s your job requirement.
But, as educationalists, our jobs may very soon depend on our skill at interacting with a machine. And the country we all need to watch in this regard is China.
That China is fast emerging as the global leader in applying Artificial Intelligence and robotics to everyday work and leisure situations is widely reported. And arguably the most dramatic impact Chinese AI technology is having is in education.
In the past year alone I’ve read reports on the use of AI to monitor China’s students in schools and university classrooms and dormitories, and on robots now doing routine morning health checks on pre-schoolers at more than 5,000 kindergartens across China.
If you’ve kept any eye at all on the dramatic changes happening within China’s education system regards AI, none of this will surprise you. You’ll already be aware that hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese kindergartens already use robots as Assistant Teachers.
Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash
But, perhaps as a throw-back to my days when a smartphone was not my closest companion and preparing for a lecture required printing my presentation on OHP acetate sheets, I still register a little unease at the speed of AI change in education. I just cannot see a robot filling the full range of a teacher’s professional duties. Nor can I envisage a robot handling the complex dynamics of school leadership; responding appropriately to the messy issues which always arise from managing teachers and students.
Of course, I could be wrong, though I certainly hope not.
I am all for AI in the classroom (less so in the staff room or Director’s meetings). But if we are not to produce a generation completely divorced from human interaction then the human teacher must prevail.
However, already one can see the trend and that trend is being pushed not so much by the Chinese government and Alibaba, but by the changing nature of work itself. As every educational expert realises, ‘to understand how AI could improve teaching and learning you need to think about how it is reshaping the nature of work.”
The days of employment predictability, if they were ever with us, are now well and truly gone. Generation Z are leaving your school for who knows what? Certainly not a career for life, or even 20 years of full-time employment. The skills of today, and tomorrow, are EQ, creativity, entrepreneurialism and critical thinking. Consequently, the days of rote learning are over, or should be, with standardised testing soon to be followed into the dustbin of history.
One-size-fits all teaching is dead.
Indeed, the very concept of teaching is dead. We don’t need any more teachers, but we do need a whole lot more learning facilitators, mentors, guides, enablers.
If teachers, and school managers, cannot step up and deliver individualised student-centred learning then for sure AI will do so.
If educationalists cannot adapt, if you cannot adapt, to the needs of a student generation already ahead of their teachers in terms of technological ability, confidence and awareness, then companies such as Squirrel will step in and fill the gap. Already Squirrel provide some evidence that their adaptive learning systems are more effective than human teaching, with AI providing a degree of ‘deeply personalised learning’ that no human teacher can match when teaching a class of 25 primary school kids.
None of this suggests that education in the 21st century will be any less vital to human self-actualisation and agency than education was in the last century.
What it does suggest is that China’s ‘current mass experiment in AI education’ has the potential to change people and therefore, change the world.
What into, remains to be seen.
Dr Stephen Whitehead (opinions are author’s own)
This article originally appeared in EDDi: Educational Digest International.