AI in Education

In a recent study, 99.4% of educators were found to believe that AI will be instrumental to their institutions competitiveness within the next three years.  However, many of these schools do not know where to start integrating AI into their programs (Ayoub).  

Exam Proctoring software

With Covid-19 being the biggest obstacle seen in 2020, exam proctoring software is becoming more common among online education.  This software is used to insure the academic honesty of students.  Some of the examples of exam proctoring services are Examity, HonorLock, Proctorio, ProctorU, and Respondus.  The software works by recording your computer’s camera, audio, and websites visited as soon as the exam starts.  Body movements are tracked and verified while the software attempts to identify cheating behavior.  If someone is participating in suspicious activity, the professor will be notified to review the recording and presents the likelihood of whether or not the student is cheating.  Each service provides a different type of software but most of them use a combination of machine learning, AI, and biometrics through facial recognition, facial detection, and eye tracking (Swauger).  

Task Automation

Task automation is another use for AI in education that can save teachers valuable time.  Tasks such as grading, lesson planning, and general administration needs are all examples of things AI can do to reduce the workload on teachers.  It is estimated that AI will be able to complete 20-40% of everyday tasks.  One of the downsides of this implementation of AI is that there are privacy concerns surrounding the idea that the lives of students will be uploaded to a computer (Klein).  

Personalized Education

Through different forms of testing, AI is able to detect what a student does and does not know.  This allows AI to create personalized study schedules that work best for the individual student by focusing on the material that they do not know and meet their specific needs.  The Knowledge Space Theory is used to represent the gaps of knowledge a student has and works to minimize that gap.  This is how AI is able to keep track of what needs to be worked on to insure the student knows the material (Plitnichenko).  

Communication

AI can help interact and communicate with people of different backgrounds.  This can be done by language translators and working in a way that might be more comfortable for a student.