Watch this Udacity interview where David Joyner explains the business and educational opportunities that intelligent tutoring (IT) can offer.
Key takeaways:
IT can bring benefits of one on one feedback to a large audience of students including those who would not have access to tutors.
Right now we see IT being used in classrooms to complement lessons.
IXL is an example of a rudimentary IT system available to the masses.
There is opportunities for IT systems to learn and improve its teaching strategies by looking at which feedback strategies resulted in greater improvement.
These are potential principles of feedback and teaching that we are not yet aware of.
Tutors help small numbers of students during their careers, developments in AI IT can mean that hundred of thousands or even millions of learners can benefit.
IT can track progression and patterns and leverage this in the teaching. Ex: a student who initially had trouble with algebra may still have these shortcomings years later. The AI could "remember" this and teach accordingly.
Challenge: IT can help with Math equations and concepts but has difficulty will more complex tasks. Joyner gives the example of a student needing help with the design of a website. The IT is not yet at a place where it can handle many variables of unknown information, including thoughts and dersires of the learner.
Challenge: IT cannot replace the benefits of human interaction since it cannot process the full range of human emotion as people can. A human tutor can connect, motivate and empathize whereas a machine, at this point, cannot.
Watch Wayne Holmes' TEDTalk entitled "I'm Not Talking About Robot Teachers". Before you click on the video, think about what the acronym AI means to you. What do you think of when you hear the term Artificial Intelligence?
Key Takeaways:
AI is all around us today: Siri, Alexa, face recognition in passport control, tumour detection in Medicine and predictive policing (to name a few).
Intelligent Tutoring Systems are designed to personalize the instruction to students through their own learning pathways by adapting the given materials.
How the student responds to material, questions and quizzes will determine the next set of given information by the AI.
Holmes uses the metaphor of school bus and UBER taxi wherein the bus represents the traditional classroom and the taxi represents the individualization possible through AI tutoring. The problem here is that both lead to the same destination and what we need to embrace as educators is personalization of outcomes that AI can provide.
There is Chinese app that welcomes personalized outcomes as the students can connect with tutors to work on an individual pathway. He does not name the app, but Preply.com is an example where students can connect with language teachers.
There is a danger of dehumanization with the proliferation of these teaching methods as human connection is being taken out of the equation.
Ethical issues include fairness, accountability, privacy and transparency.
Holmes proposes that we use AI learning companions to give student guidance and support to suit their needs. This would would enable teachers to take advantage of AI instead of being replaced by AI.
AI is going to come to a classroom near you but we have to be careful about . We need to engage as educators to think about