Alexa, Siri, Google, and most recently, ChatGPT – this is just the tip of the AI iceberg. Artificial Intelligence has come a long way from answering search queries, setting timers/alarms, and calling someone from our contact lists. It has wiggled its way into education, but how? Read on for your guide to how AI will affect the future of your child’s education, and how they will learn, from a very young age!
Before delving further into AI's role in education, we need to establish what it is. Using UNICEF’s definition, “AI refers to machine-based systems that can, given a set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions that influence real or virtual environments.”
Machine-based systems are manmade. Anything manmade will always have errors and questionable ethics (what can be good for one doesn’t make it good for everybody else). And because AI is continuously developing - standards, parameters, and laws on how it can be used are also developing and trying to catch up.
As a parent, it is your responsibility to be vigilant about how your child uses AI, not just at home but also in the classroom. Just because laws have not been passed or schools have not established any rigid guidelines, it doesn’t mean you cannot be informed to make your own decisions regarding your child’s AI usage. Knowing how AI is currently used in your child’s education will help you understand how it will affect the future of education.
In addition to the benefits of increased inclusion (assistive technology allows blind students to have AI read texts to them, multimodal access for children with disabilities), universal access (online classes and degrees available from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer and internet access), and individualized/adapted learning, there’s a long list of how schools are using AI to benefit all parties (school owners, teachers, administrators, and students).
There are many more examples such as plagiarism detection, writing assistance, and professional development for educators (seminars, webinars, and others are accessible), providing culturally relevant content, to name a few.
AI can only become better from this point forward if governments help safeguard its usage. We cannot tell what other advancements AI can provide for education as discoveries and experiments are happening every day. But if we take a closer look at what AI has done so far and surmise how these can be improved, then we can have a good bird’s eye view of what the future of AI in education will look like. This should also include knowing the current pitfalls of AI.
AI already exceeds the normal human brain in certain aspects - for example, GPT-4 scores higher than 88% of humans on the LSAT where it got 163/180 (the average human score is 152). Its brain capacity can be described as a standard postgraduate that can still make errors and isn’t perfect. While full reliance on AI is bound to happen, several concerns need to be addressed for the future of AI in education to be positive.
It’s very important to ask your child’s school or future school for a deep dive into how their institution uses AI. Your awareness is critical to help your child navigate AI and use it to better their education and not the other way around.
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