AI for Education Gets an A+
From fast-food chains to financial service providers, retailers to real-estate agents — thousands of businesses across a wide variety of industries are unlocking the benefits of chatbot technology.
One such industry that stands to be revolutionised by AI is Education. Adoption of this technology by educational institutions, bursts open the proverbial floodgate of opportunity for personalised, focused, engaging conversations with learners, as well as powerful tools to enhance the efficiency, value and productivity of teachers.
Here are just a few examples of how the future of education is being shaped by the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
On-demand teacher assistance
While chatbots are by no means a teacher-replacement strategy, they do offer the ability to take responsibility of the more repetitive tasks, freeing up teachers’ time to make their role more meaningful.
Rather than a student being stumped with a burning question while studying at 10pm, a chatbot gives them 24/7 access to teacher support. While more complex queries would of course still require human assistance, chatbots can be programmed with a wealth of data based on common queries that would enable them to provide assistance to a large percentage of queries.
In 2016, a professor at Georgia Tech — Asok Goel — created a virtual assistant to help alleviate the staff’s workload by answering student queries.
Ms Jill Watson (powered by IBM’s AI system, ‘Watson’) received raving reviews from students, who had no idea of her true identity until they had completed their exams.
After gaining huge publicity, Jill Watson is being implemented in universities around the world. This is an invaluable asset, particularly for online courses, where students don’t usually have the opportunity for human interaction, which often leads to poor results or, in worse cases, students dropping out.
Test and essay marking
One of the most daunting and time-consuming responsibilities of a teacher’s role has to be test marking. The great news is that machine learning and natural language understanding technology allow for the human marker to be removed from the equation. The capabilities of these technologies go beyond basic multiple-choice scanning to being able to interpret and grade even complex, open-ended answers and essay tests. That definitely gets full marks!
Personalised education
It’s no secret that children have different abilities, learning paces, ways of thinking and applying knowledge. While private tutors or extra one-on-one lessons provide a solution for a student requiring additional assistance, this isn’t always available at learning institutions and can be a very hefty expense.
Chatbots can offer an affordable, personalised virtual learning experience that is tailored to a student’s exact needs.
The Summit Learning Project is an excellent example of this. A free online platform designed by teachers, it “allows every student to set their own individual goals, create roadmaps to achieve them, learn content at their own pace, and dive into meaningful Projects that connect to the real world.” (summitlearning.org)
From engaging in conversation with the students, these virtual tutors determine the areas that the student may require more assistance with and create an entirely personalised learning program that shifts the right amount of focus to the areas that need it. Teachers have full access to students’ programs and progress, which they’re able to adapt and use to guide their instruction and mentoring of the students. Even parents have full access to their children’s dashboard to keep up to date with where they are and what they’re working on. According to their website, Summit Schools are consistently ranked among the top in the United States, with ninety-eight percent of graduates being accepted into at least one four-year college. It’s hard to contest those results, isn’t it?
Student feedback
When it comes to feedback on a course or teacher, surveys are usually the go-to solution. Time and resource limitations mean that one-on-one feedback sessions aren’t really an option.
Enter the chatbot.
Chatbots provide a conversational feedback platform that’s tailored to the student’s responses and even their personality. They’re able to interpret an answer and delve deeper into why the student may feel that way or what they feel would have been more effective, thereby gaining far more qualitative feedback and insight than possible with a standardised survey.
Spaced Interval Learning
Remember all those hours spent cramming for exams, only to forget everything you learnt a couple of months later? The ‘spaced interval learning’ concept — basically repeating old lessons when you are about to forget them — was created by Polish inventor, Piotr Wozniak and was the basis for the app SuperMemo. By keeping track of what you learn and when you learn it, the app figures out when you are most likely to forget the information and reminds you to repeat the lesson. By repeating the information only a couple of times, your long-term retention is drastically increased.
Student enrollment and onboarding
When it comes to higher education in particular, chatbots provide the perfect solution for answering students’ campus and course-related queries, streamlining and simplifying the completion of administrative processes required for enrollment (completion of forms, tests, fee payments, etc) and helping students integrate seamlessly into the educational institution. This not only makes students’ lives a whole lot easier — eliminating the expedition to find the right person to answer each of their queries — but also alleviates the pressure on the faculty who is usually faced with the task of answering the same queries year after year.
Deakin Genie, a virtual assistant for students of Deakin University in Australia, offers up every piece of campus-life information a student could wish for. From locating a lecture hall to finding out deadlines for assignments, enrolling for a class or even where they need to park — it’s all available to them through chat and voice recognition. And in true machine learning style, the more students access it, the smarter and more intuitive it becomes.
You can watch a snippet of Deakin Genie in action here.
Want to know more?
Interested in finding out more about how chatbots can add value to education, or any industry for that matter? Reach out to us at chat@feersum.io and let’s chat.
