Artificial Intelligence: The Cynosure of all Eyes in the Education Sector

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the latest buzzword in almost every sector. Nearly every sector ranging from health, finance, entertainment, retail, banking and many more are gaining from the effectiveness and the smart solutions that Artificial Intelligence provides. One of the sectors that is benefitting immensely from AI is the education sector. This sector is one of the most important sectors as it is the foundation on which a future of a nation is built.

There are mainly two types of methodologies for imparting education to the young learners: one is the traditional method of teaching and learning and other is the smart method of teaching and learning. With the rapid growth of network and infrastructure, the smart method of teaching and learning has gained popularity in the recent years. Let us dive deep in to the list of benefits that AI provides to those involved in the teaching-learning process.

1. Global learning: AI has busted the myth that teaching-learning process can be executed successfully in a physical classroom only. Today, with the advent of online courses, the youth and the students can learn any subject of their interest at any time and at any place. Gone are the days when learning could happen only in a fixed duration of the day. Now, it has become more flexible, efficient and user-friendly. Only what is needed is a computer with internet connection.
2. Rich content: In the traditional method of teaching and learning, the content of the subjects are limited to the textbooks only. On the other hand, in AI-assisted teaching and learning, the content of the subject is rich and vast as it is full of interactive tools of imparting knowledge. Review practice questions, summaries of topics, intelligent animations are to name a few among these tools. These intelligent animations give the learners a real feel of the concept that they are studying, thus resulting in ease of understanding.
3. Ease of administrative tasks: The educators have to spend a lot of time in evaluating their students’ performance, assessing their home-tasks and grading them. These tasks can be automated by AI easily and efficiently. Eventually, this will result in saving of time. This time can be utilized to focus on individual student’s weakness and honing their skills. People in administration can gain from AI which can automate their daily reporting and other jobs which require human intervention. They can utilize their time to come up with innovation and creative ventures for the benefit of the youth.
4. Personalized education: A single method of teaching cannot cater to every student with varying intelligence and skills. The solution is personalized education. This type of education system can be designed with the help of AI. Customization of courses as per students’ need will bring a lot of changes in their pace of understanding the course. The feedback system can be automated with AI which can then highlight the overall success of the course by sending the report to both teachers and students. Based on these reports, corrective action can be taken to improve the performance of the students.
5. Additional support from AI tutors: A student may be good in picking up new topics, but one may not be well-versed with the basic mathematics, writing and other basic subjects. These bunch of students can gain additional support by availing of the facility of additional support from AI tutors which is a form of automated learning. In this form of learning, recommendation systems, which is conceptualized on AI, may be provided for free learning resources. These systems can give suggestions to the learners based on their browsing preferences.
6. Course improvement: There might be some gaps in the delivery content of the educators at times. This may lead to non-uniform understanding of the concept by the students. To provide a uniform delivery of the content to the students and the same dissemination of information, the course can be put through an AI system for suggesting changes in the content delivery, if required. For instance: If a large number of students answer a question wrongly, then the system can alert the teacher and provide hints to such questions for future students of the course.
7. Role change of teachers: With the advent of expert systems and AI, the role of teacher may shift more towards that of a facilitator. Teachers will supplement AI lessons, provide hands-on experience to the students and help students struggling to learn the new concepts. The basic concepts can be learned from the automated AI systems and the deeper knowledge can be gained from the classes of the educators, thus helping both the teachers and the students.

Thus it is evident from the above list how robust and efficient the power of Artificial Intelligence is. The education sector, especially, can harness the power of AI to build the leaders of tomorrow and thus build a firm foundation for educating the society.