AI and Today’s Classroom Education

In today’s school education, teaching and learning are not the same as before.  Earlier, It used to be face-to-face teaching with a focus on persuasive and demonstrative oration, quick grasping, and critical thinking, unlike today’s partial dependency on menu-driven machine learning.

While talking about the usage of machines in each department of the organized sector, we are forced to categorize the usage of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its benefits from the perspective of the trainers, learners, and organization. At the people personality building and shaping level, many doubts and promises arise when it comes to the utilization of AI in today’s classroom education

Machine learning, a branch of AI, is proposed to satiate the demands of the learner by performing expected tasks without any human intervention. In the process, as the techniques and strategies are getting a face-lift with an increase in the number of students, each has a question to ask

Can a machine replace a human being at the data-entry level? Can it generate the marks cards with grades and percentiles by just feeding the marks scored by each student? Can it diagnose the deficient/ poor areas in the learning sphere of a particular child? Can it recommend a solution for the deficiency of the area to be boosted? Will it replace a human teacher in future?

Digitization

There is always an argument about the usage of menu-driven computer-based Educational Technology and emotion-filled, flexible, human-teacher-driven free-flowing teaching. We debate, however, irrespective of the mode of education, children are taught with personalized attention with a customized plan and method.

Is the usage of machines considered a mere tool?

 There is a reasonable rationalization that no machine can give the human touch while teaching, as it cannot read the mood and emotions of a learner. The deeper reason is, the way a teacher trains, interprets and reasons out why and how certain things should be handled, stands out !

Advantages

Futuristic approaches to address various demands are cropping up and to address this Troubleshooting by machines is thought to be the saviour

1. With machines, learning can be time-saving. Learners can re-run the teaching module many times. While running the modules don’t get tired and don’t change the tone of teaching.
2. Tutoring gamut has expanded form face to face, in-person teaching-learning to virtual machine-human interactive learning with the focus on my-learning-style.
3. Machine tutoring has made itself available round-the-clock for the enthusiasts and for the obsessed learners

Is education steering toward computer-generated teaching-learning modalities?

1. Supporting parents and the school community is showing a welcome gesture to embrace technology for their convenience (is the key focus of the school administration too!) The amalgamation of Knowledge, previous experience, perpetual demand, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving ability, and the confidence of a modern man has led to an innovative revolution in the field of teaching and learning.
2. If machines with intelligence-fed-software can work with human teachers and if they can wipe away the shortage of teachers/ facilitators with specific expertise, deployment of machines, their constant evolution and upgradation in the field of pedagogy is very much necessary

The advent of Machines and the usage of their intelligence is a boon to each administrative arena in the field of education

1. Automation of classrooms is helping in easing the process and is acting as a support mechanism for all human efforts.
2. Executive and administrative functions are equally prioritized and well taken care of with more and more refined automation in the field of school and college learning.
3. Do you know how many man-hours it would take to frame the policies and develop a child-friendly curriculum in an institution with the help of a bunch of humans? Now, it is done in a matter of a few hours with precision.
4. In earlier times, curriculum development in an institution was painful and laborious. Now, when you are surrounded by machines, what else do you want at your command and at your disposal ?
5. Automated machines have made the job easier in terms of preparing a school timetable, responding to phone calls before and after school hours, taking attendance and dealing with absentees of the students and the faculty and non-faculty members of the school, dealing with assignments, etc.
6. Using machines, by feeding the available statistical data, one can get a customized, adaptive method of assessment to deviate from the one-suits-all method of assessment.
7. Access to a variety of learning materials can be a good source for teaching a spectrum of children with not-so-obvious weaknesses. This is the area that needs to be addressed at the earliest.
8. Usage of Automated Grading Systems for convenience, like a paper grader, is a new-age solution. It simplifies the process of grading assignments in bulk to save time without compromising on the quality. Credits or grades are a way to help students understand the quality of their words. Manual assignment evaluation needs two people to check on the quality and requires consistency and an unbiased approach!
9. At the University level, Research papers are graded with utmost transparency in the quickest possible time limit with almost all the available data under the sun. By minimizing the fieldwork to collect the raw data, can candidates depend on AI-generated statistics for their study?
10. Learners and tutors collaborating with each other across the countries are getting benefitted for the better
11. Career counseling and guidance is happening at the drop of the hat with the already fed specifications for a specified course. Tools for the assessment under the career guidance are getting updated often and are providing the real-time skill requirements and grooming tips for the job

A few nagging doubts !!

1. In today’s age, learners don’t depend on paper and pen anymore, for noting down, as they used to do earlier. The learner can fall back on the machine to fill the gap that he/she would have missed out, in the process of acquiring the knowledge, and can always procrastinate in reaching the scheduled milestones.
2. If all the cognitive operations are handled by the machines, how can the learners emerge as constructivists in the process of learning?
3. Learners checking on their mistakes and paying heed to the warning alerts by the machines can remain as an on-hand, at-that-moment, problem-solving strategy. This strategic problem solving method does not get etched in the minds, of the learners, for the forthcoming crisis to troubleshoot.
4. The questions which elicit long answers can have multiple ways of expression. Only a human evaluator can differentiate between a very well-crafted answer and a grammatically -poor long answer written by a student, who faces a language barrier and comes from a different coultural background. Only a human teacher can decipher an illegible, poorly written answer and allocate marks by sifting the essence.
5. There are many informative texts on the internet about why machine learning is important and how machine learning Algorithms.Why Should You Choose Machine Learning? . If humans commit errors and if they create errors in setting the algorithms, can AI recommendations show bias, based on the neural network it is set on?
6. There is always a fear of the leakage of personal data with the whole load of information stored for the posterity
7. With an influx of newer technology into the arena of education, non- e-savvy teachers are expected to learn the nuances of automation and qualify for certification. On the other hand, young tutors can learn easily by bridging the methods and skill-sets that they already have in their possession.
8. However, to run the machine fed on AI, there needs a human to keep a check-on the proper up-keep and the efficacy of its existence, diagnosis, and recommendation
9. A detailed study on the machine learning and its benefits with a few limitations is done on a spectrum of samples from various different countries and the out come is made visible for the public view.The study found that students’ interests dropped after one week with chatbot, and the Structural Equation Modelling indicated that task interest predicted future course interest in human partner conditions, while under Chatbot partner conditions it did not. While researchers attributed the decrease in interest to a novelty effect (Fryer et al.), it calls for more empirical studies to examine effects of chatbot in education.
10. By the end of the day, we are left with a gaping question to answer -Are machines controlling the humans or are the humans controlling the machines??