How Artificial Intelligence

Is Shaping the Future of

Education
Thanks to advances in AI and machine learning, a slow but steady transformation is coming
to education—under the hood.

When you compare the typical 21st century classroom with that of the
early 1900s, the differences aren't terribly obvious. Teachers will be
standing in front, giving instructions and sharing notes on a modern -
day version of the old blackboard—say, an overhead projector or a
shared computer display. Students will be sitting at their desks in the
classroom or watching via online video-conferencing software. The
technology has changed: A lot of the tools and processes have been
digitized, some of it has been automated, and geographical barriers
have been removed to some extent—but the actors and elements have
remained much the same.

But thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine

learning, a slow but steady transformation is coming to educati on,
under the hood. In a few years, teachers will no longer be alone in
shouldering the burden of training the young generation or the
workforce at corporations.

Already, AI algorithms are helping enhance education by collecting,

analyzing, and correlating every interaction that takes place in physical
and virtual classrooms, and helping teachers to address the specific
pain points of each student. This might be the beginning of a revolution
in one of the oldest and most valuable social skills that mankind has
developed, and an imperative in a world where humans live and work
alongside smart machines.
Measuring Learner Progress
Instructors have to take into account every reaction to a lecture, every
blank or attentive stare, every eager or hesitant response to a question,
every assignment that is turned in early or late, and a lot more when
assessing a student's grasp of a concept. This is how they can find out
where students are lagging and steer them in the right direction.

It is also why measuring a learner's progress, an endeavor that is

deeply social in nature, is one of the biggest challenges every teacher
faces, and a task that is hard to accomplish with classic rule-based
software.

"Course lectures, whether on a college campus or in a corporation, are

predominantly one-size-fits-all, with the dominant mode being
teachers speaking to students," says Chris Brinton, Head of Research at
Zoomi, an AI company that specializes in capturing and analyzing
behavioral data in educational settings. "This is born out of necessity:
it would be impossible, or at least inefficient from the standpoint of
time, for the teacher to pause the lecture for prolonged periods of time
and address each student concern individually to bring all to the same
page. Instead, a student with many questions would usually be asked
to follow up with the instructor outside of class time."

However, machine learning algorithms, which are based on analyzing

and finding patterns and correlations between data points, are proving
to be an effective tool in helping teachers quantify a student's
understanding of a lecture.
"By analyzing specific student data, AI has the potential to help surface
more quickly areas in which students may need more help, thereby
improving student achievement and teacher support," says Jessie
Woolley-Wilson, president and CEO of DreamBox Learning, an
intelligent math-learning platform.

Equipping the classroom with artificial intelligence is the equivalent of

providing every student with a digital tutor, Brinton explains. "The
algorithms driving AI can be trained to detect when a learner is
struggling and what caused them to struggle, or when they are bored
and what caused their boredom," he says.

This is a shift from traditional learning software, which relied only on

assessment responses to measure students' grasp of the topics they
study. "This data is often not available during a lecture, much less at
the subsecond granularity in which a student may switch from a clear
to confused point of view," Brinton says.

There are now a number of AI-powered platforms that create rich

digital profiles of each student by collecting live information from the
user's interaction with course material and context. In addition to
keeping records of grades and scores, Zoomi, the platform Brinton
helped develop, tracks micro-interactions such as viewing specific
slides or pages on PDF documents, replaying a specific part of a video,
or posting a question or answer on a discussion forum.

The data is then used to build a model that can give real -time insights
into a student's understanding and engagement with specific topics.
Data models also help in finding common patterns among multiple
students and performing predictive analytics, such as forecasting how
students will perform in the future.

More advanced use of AI can involve the employment of complicated

computer-vision algorithms to analyze facial expressions, such as
boredom and distractedness, and link those to the other data gathered
on students in order to create a more complete picture of a studen t's
learner model.

Finding and Addressing Gaps in

Learning
There are multiple benefits to having a reliable digital model that
represents a student's knowledge. "The data can be used either
automatically by an intelligent system to immediately engage students
in learning experiences that specifically address those gaps in
understanding, or by the teacher to identify—and respond to—those
specific areas of need," says Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox.

Third Space Learning, an online education platform founded in 2012 to

provide one-to-one math tutoring, is now leveraging AI algorithms to
help improve the performance of teachers. Since its launch, Third Space
has recorded data about thousands of sessions. In partnership with
University of College London, Third Space is now engaged in a project
to mine the data with AI algorithms in order to find successful learning
and teaching patterns and provide real-time feedback to its online
tutors about how their students are keeping up with lessons.

The AI learner model can also power intelligent tutoring systems (ITS).
Intelligent tutors, which can work in a self-paced learning environment
or in conjunction with human teachers, use a student's historical and
real-time data to provide them with personalized content tuned to their
specific strengths and weaknesses. Providing a personalized learning
experience is a goal that teachers have always struggled to achieve.

"AI-powered tutoring systems have shown to be effective at teaching

well-defined subject areas, such as maths and physics," says Rose
Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design at the University of
College London Knowledge Lab. "AI can currently relieve pain points
by helping with record-keeping and with the selection and
recommendation of resources for learners to use."
An example is MATHIA, a AI-powered math learning platform
developed by Carnegie Learning that mirrors the behavior of human
tutors. MATHIA collects various data points and employs machine
learning algorithms and predictive models to determine students'
knowledge and skill levels and estimate their performance in the
future. The platform uses this data to adapt the learning path according
to students' learning processes.

"Each step in a problem, which could involve filling in a cell in a

spreadsheet, plotting a point on a graph, etc., is associated with one or
more cognitive skills," says Steve Ritter, Chief Product Architect at
Carnegie Learning. "Depending on whether the student does the step
correctly or not, or asks for a hint, we adjust our estimate of the
student's knowledge on the associated skills."

MATHIA uses "knowledge tracing," the process of determining a

student's understanding of different concepts, as well as "model
tracing," the process of understanding a student's approach to solving
problems, in order to adjust the software's support fo r the individual
student's thinking process instead of redirecting them to a standard
approach that may not make sense to them. This helps provide
personalized content, with possibly countless learning paths.

"Our hints, for example, change based on the order in which students
complete the problem steps, if this ordering reflects different ways of
approaching the problem," Ritter says.

The evolution of intelligent tutoring systems can eventually lead to a

richer self-paced learning experience. While it won't be a replacement
for human teachers, AI-powered online learning platforms can play a
pivotal role in making high-quality education available in areas where
there's a shortage of teachers, and students have to learn by
themselves.

"The combination of big data and AI could provide learners with their
own personal analytics, which they can leverage to become the most
effective learner they can be," says Luckin.

Self-knowledge (knowing what you do and don't know) and self-

regulation (for example, being able to stop yourself from being
distracted by what someone else is doing) are two skills that such
systems can help develop, according to Luckin.

"AI can be used to scaffold (support) learners to develop these key

skills by reflecting back across their personal data using carefully
designed interfaces and visualisations," Luckin says. "In this way all
learners could be helped to be better at learning, which would be useful
across all subject areas."

One of the benefits of AI-powered learning systems is the seamless

assistance they can provide. "The same intelligent technologies that
help students and their teachers inside the classroom should always be
leveraged to do the same outside of the classroom," says Woolley -
Wilson. "They can bring the same power of personalized
recommendations wherever the student is. Learning opportunities and
access should no longer be restricted to a certain time or place as
they've typically been in our analog past."

Corporate training can also benefit from AI personalization. Zoomi,

which provides online tools for professional training, uses AI
algorithms to recognize learner preferences and dynamically adapt
course content to meet their needs. For instance, based on a user's past
behavior and reaction to different media types, the platform can decide
whether course material should be served in a PDF or video format.
Progressive Business Partners has been using the platform since 2016
to train HR professionals, resulting in a 12-percent increase in course
completion and a 30-percent increase in revenue.
Finding and Addressing Gaps in
Teaching
When students lag behind in a lesson, flaws in teaching methods and
curriculum are often as much to blame as weaknesses in the students
themselves. Was the cause of student misunderstanding something
about the material itself, the manner in which it was presented, or the
timing of the material within the flow of the curriculum? Was it that
the student had the flu when some necessary concepts were covered
previously? How did the student engage with the material—actively or
passively?
Those are some of the questions that every teacher has to answer when
assessing the quality of a delivered lesson and investigating the root
causes of problems in learning.

"Great systems can leverage huge data sets to assist teachers in finding
both weaknesses in curriculum and in finding struggling students,"
says Woolley-Wilson. "And it's important to remember that the amount
of help provided to the teacher depends on the quality of data available
informing the analysis."

DreamBox's online adaptive-learning platform uses the data it collects

from students to uncover learning gaps and then helps teachers to
address them at the class level or for specific groups or individual
students. This can include creating strategy groups, personalized
learning plans, or focused assignments that address specific gaps and
complement the core curriculum.

AI also helps teachers in assessing the relevance of their teaching

material. "While the content is delivered 'live' in a clas sroom setting,
most instructors prepare their materials electronically," says Brinton,
the researcher from Zoomi. "As a result, it's possible for AI technologies
to interpret the material, determine the topics covered, and even
analyze the course assessment materials to gain insight [as to] how
well the assessment covers the course content."

Zoomi uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), the branch of AI that

parses the content and context of written material, to weigh the quality
of a teacher's course material. Zoomi's algorithms remove content that
does not have a positive impact on the learning process. The company
is also working on algorithms that augment the learning experience by
finding complementary content and repurposing it to fit within the
context of a particular lesson where a student is struggling.

"Soon, algorithms may be able to modify sentences for clarity, and even
author new material on their own just as a human would do," Brinton
says.

Content Technologies, Inc (CTI), an artificial intelligence research and

development company based in California, has developed AI that
automatically generates customized educational content. CTI 's engine
uses deep learning to ingest and analyze syllabus and course material,
master the knowledge and generate new content such as custom
textbooks, chapter summaries, and multiple choice tests. The
technology is being used by a number of companies and educational
institutions.
Education Will Remain a Social
Experience
While we've seen impressive efforts in the application of artificial
intelligence in education, the results pale in comparison to other
domains where AI algorithms are causing major disruptions. The
reason is that education and learning are fundamentally social
experiences that are extremely hard—if not impossible—to automate.

"AI cannot replace teachers, because it has no self-awareness or

metacognitive regulation, and it also lacks empathy," Luckin, the
professor from UCL Knowledge Lab. "However, AI, when its design is
informed by what we know about learning and teachi ng (i.e. the
learning sciences), can be combined with big data about learners to
unpack the black box of learning and enable learners, teachers, and
parents to track progress across multiple subjects, skills, and
characteristics—this can provide vital information to support learners
to become more effective as learners as well as to help them learn
knowledge and skills."

The augmentation and assistance that AI provides to the education and

learning process will make teachers even more productive and
efficient. "Teachers will be able to focus on what they can do best:
create excellent content, deliver strong lectures, and address the most
pervasive pain points both in person and remotely, individually and in
groups," says Brinton.
Another social aspect of education is collaboration. Students often
learn more from working in groups and with each other as they do from
listening to lectures and solving problems at their own pace. "The goals
of education include more social interaction, such as learning to be a
good collaborator or to communicate with others," says Ritter, the
product architect from Carnegie Learning. "So a challenge in
personalizing instruction is to balance seeing a student as an
independent learner who can proceed at his or her own pace with the
need to work collaboratively with others."

But AI might also become a facilitator in collaborative learning.

Intelligence Unleashed, a joint research paper by UCL and Pearson,
which Luckin coauthored, explains that AI can support collaborative
learning by comparing student learner models and suggesting
groupings in which participants are at a similar cogni tive level or have
complementary skills and can help each other out. AI can also take part
in learner groups as a member and help sway discussions in the right
direction by providing content, posing questions and providing
alternative viewpoints.

The ubiquity of AI across the learning process will eventually

revolutionize education. According to a Stanford University report, in
the next fifteen years, it is likely that human teachers will be assisted
by AI technologies that will result in better human interaction both in
the classroom and in the home.

The classroom might remain more or less as it is today, but thanks to

digital assistants, AI algorithms, and more capable teachers, future
generations will hopefully have access to higher quality education and
will be able to learn at a much faster pace.

This story originally appeared in the PCMag Digital Edition: a curated,

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