Visualising online education alongside AI

This document is a short introduction to how we see AI being integrated into the online education landscape in the near future. This is a condensed version of a longer document that covers ten perspectives. This shorter version focuses on five of the ten:

Student

Let‘s start with the role of the Student examining some ways in which AI can reduce student frustration during their learning journey, and enhance it with features not possible through traditional automation.

Adaptive Assistance

One of the key phrases one hears when it comes to the use of AI within education is Adaptive Learning Paths - the idea usually goes along the lines of“an AI can come up with alternate paths of learning for students based on their individual needs”. This idea runs counter to our experience that, at the beginner-level, the concepts that all students need to learn are the same, and the general path (in terms of sequence of concepts to learn) is also the same. We believe that the AI should instead be used to provide Adaptive Assistance, by providing additional examples and use cases based on where a student is struggling.

Multilingual

Students should be able to converse with the AI in any language they choose - either by typing or simply speaking with the AI - it should be able to reply in their own language. In the case of technical courses, AIs should simply mix technical lingo in the source language (English, presumably) with the language of student‘s choice.

Frequent AI-reviewed assignments

Our experience with human-reviewed assignments that give submissions nuanced grades informs us that students will repeat work, resubmitting to improve grades. This repetition is key to gaining experience through practise. However, we also know that scaling human-reviewed assignments is prohibitively expensive.AI-assisted generation of assignments is a way for students to quickly check whether their understanding of a topic is up to par.

Personalized progress report

The AI assistant can look at the sum of a student‘s work over time, and give them an overview of what it thinks of their progress. For example, if a student is working irregularly, it can suggest that they stick to workable, but regular schedule of work, and even prepare a study plan for them.

Author

A course author‘s role is varied and critical. They act as subject matter experts, defining the contours of the course - its objectives and measurable outcomes - and build and refine its content, alongside defining the tests that measure student progress. AI can assist in this workload in a number of ways, freeing up authors time and allowing them to keep course content up-to-date with ever-increasing standards of work.

AI-enabled content authoring & editing

Weaving in AI features into course authoring tools will allow authors to quickly generate starter content based on a given prompt. The AI should also be able to ingest existing content and suggest improvements, based either on its own opinion, or in line with a given prompt.

AI-generated images & videos

In addition to textual content, we should imagine a future where AIs are able to generate images with readable text andstable videos which can accurately portray the requirements given in the prompt. Current AI models cannot do thisreliably. However, it isn‘t far-fetched to imagine a near-future with such capabilities.

Teacher

Parents often do not have the time or resources necessary to monitor their children‘s education. In that sense, a teacher is often the stand-in, charged with much the same role. AI allows us to empower teachers with tools that can let them play that role, in a meaningful way, for the large numbers of students whose development they are expected to foster.

Highlighting students who need more attention

Unlike parents, teachers are given charge over a large number of students. Constantly monitoring the needs of a large group can be exhausting. AI assistants such as the Course Monitor do not tire, and can bring up cases of students who need intervention by constantly checking on their activity.

Evaluator

While teachers, parents, authors, coaches and teaching assistants play crucial roles in facilitating learning, the ultimate responsibility for engaging with the material, practicing skills, and internalizing knowledge lies with the students themselves.

Regular evaluation is required to ensure that students are meeting their responsibilities and making progress. It is a tool to measure the extent to which students truly learn from the course material they‘re going through, and the assignments they undertake as a part of it.

The best evaluation is a one-on-one conversation between the student and a subject-matter expert. A personal interview, of sorts; AI can help us achieve this with a frequency and level of detail previously inconceivable.

Pupilfirst Trials

We envision a set of closely related tools that allow us to run frequent trials of a student‘s skill. These AI-driven assessments aim to evaluate students‘ understanding and mastery of course material based on detailed expected learning outcomes.

Hiring Partner

Connecting students to jobs suited to their newly acquired skills is a clear and valuable goal. We aim to build new AI-powered interfaces that allow hiring partners to discuss their requirements, post job listings, and match them to students with the required skills. Partners can also utilize Pupilfirst Trials for conducting additional testing to verify specific skills.