Artificial Intelligence has the potential to differentiate learning akin to Amazon's "Alexa" personalization of the home; apps such as Speechify, CK-12 and Screencastify will help students to learn new concepts faster while differentiating instruction to match individual student competency

AI assistants can more effectively fulfil some tasks (content delivery, assessment and diagnostics, etc.), which frees teachers to be managers and guides of increasingly personalized learning

The Teacher-Student relationship will still be critical, as will an accessible common space (a.k.a. classroom) to foster connections; AI will simply deliver analytics that aids educators to structure these spaces more effectively

We invite you to review some of the other, well curated content from UBC's MET students on Chatbots and their opportunities in the classroom (curated by Meagan Strome and John Wu)

The online dimension of K-12 learning is going to continue becoming embedded into in-person classrooms, hybrid learning, and distance learning spaces, though primary (K-2) education is likely to remain predominantly in-person due to low student self-regulation development

That said, synchronous online learning has been shown to be much more meaningful than asynchronous models

Affording online students a means to engage with peers in the physical (or virtual) classroom space will be critical to the success of the hybrid learning model in future

Dixson (2010) suggests 4 key areas of focus for online learning:

• Skill Development - Keeping up to date on required lessons

• Emotional engagement- Making exciting learning activities

• Participation & interaction- Creating and implementing collaborative learning structures

• Recognizing Performance - assessing student effort/performance & offering personalized feedback