Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of education, from personalized learning to adaptive assessment. But how can you combine AI with ed tech to create engaging and effective learning experiences for your students or learners? In this article, we will explore some of the ways you can use AI to enhance your ed tech projects, tools, and platforms.
AI in ed tech refers to the use of intelligent systems and algorithms that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing images, generating content, or providing feedback. AI can help ed tech developers and educators to create more interactive, adaptive, and personalized learning environments that can cater to the diverse needs, preferences, and goals of learners.
When a product team is developing an EdTech solutions. It can be beneficial to take a step back and reflect on the framing of the problem in which AI is used to solve. It's easy to get caught up in the novelty and excitement of this new and powerful technology. Reflect on the question if we are solving the right problem or just providing a cool tools that use AI. What is the underlying reason for choosing a specific form of AI. In the case of exploring how to provide added value to teachers by integrating AI to a lesson creation tool. Are we solving the problem of "lack of images to choose from" by adding an "image generator" or are solving the problem of "lack of time to be creative" by adding a "alternative lesson delivery generator".
One of the ways you can use AI to design ed tech is to apply user-centered design principles and methods, such as personas, scenarios, user stories, and prototyping. These can help you to understand your target audience, their problems, motivations, and expectations, and how they interact with your ed tech solution. You can also use AI to test and evaluate your ed tech design, by using tools such as A/B testing, analytics, or chatbots, that can collect and analyze data on user behavior, feedback, and satisfaction.
When using AI as a tool to empower the discovery process it's important to adopt a reflective and critical mindset to the AI output. Include a solid practice to always review the content provided by the system. Measure should be taken to minimise that ideas are build on biased or old information. AI is not perfect as it has build-in biases and is trained on old data/information. AI should never fully substitute interaction with your users. Qualitative interactions with your users provide additional layers of humanness. Discovering the "why" of a problem requires using multiple senses.
Another way you can use AI to develop ed tech is to leverage existing AI frameworks, libraries, and services that can help you to implement various AI features and functionalities in your ed tech project. For example, you can use natural language processing (NLP) to enable voice or text interaction, sentiment analysis, or content generation. You can use computer vision to enable image or video recognition, face detection, or emotion analysis. You can use machine learning (ML) to enable data mining, classification, or recommendation.
For me, it's essential to focus on the product side rather than on the technology. Large language models can process natural language effectively, but to what extent does this truly help? It is possible to determine emotions via text and video, but what's the financial implication of that? On the contrary, I would encourage a problem-first approach. What are the current issues in EdTech? Outdated lecture-based formats, large group education instead of one-to-one learning, universal rather than personalised content, unengaging text, and poorly connected disciplines (for instance, the relationship between literature and mathematics). These are areas where AI could truly benefit EdTech.
A third way you can use AI to deliver ed tech is to optimize the learning experience and outcomes for your users. You can use AI to provide personalized learning paths, content, and feedback that can adapt to the learner's level, pace, style, and interests. You can use AI to provide adaptive assessment and evaluation that can measure the learner's progress, performance, and mastery. You can use AI to provide gamification and engagement that can motivate, reward, and challenge the learner.
Artificial Intelligence + teachers, a powerful combination. AI is in charge of: - Automate repetitive tasks (registrations, notifications, some mails, etc.). - Manage feedback forms - Translate into other languages - Generate complementary pieces of content - Chats to solve frequently asked questions - among many others While the teachers take care of: - Further research - Create materials - Curate quality content - Consolidate a database of sources - Creating learning experiences - Designing routes - and many more tasks This can be a great combination to make learning a memorable and effective experience. P.S. An example: Platzi, a big e-learning platform in Latin America, integrated its AI Learning assistant to help its students.
A final way you can use AI to improve ed tech is to continuously monitor, update, and refine your ed tech solution based on the data and insights you gather from your users and the environment. You can use AI to identify gaps, errors, or issues in your ed tech content, functionality, or usability. You can use AI to discover new trends, opportunities, or innovations in your ed tech domain or market. You can use AI to enhance your ed tech quality, reliability, and security.
Ed tech has an accessibility issue. With 16% of us (1 in 6) impacted by a serious disability, Edtech solution providers have an obligation to not just support, but to help move the needle forward on building inclusive learning environments. AI provides many equalizing solutions and opportunites to edtech providers that help support these types of learners. This includes generating Alt / descriptive text for images and videos, transcripts, text to audio, text to multilanguage / audio + more. In 2023 Solution providers are more and more being held accountable (FINED!) for not supporting their diverse learner audiences. AI can finally help close that gap.
**AI in Ed Tech:** AI transforms education technology: 1.Personalized Learning: AI tailors content for individual students, optimizing their learning. 2.Adaptive Assessments: Continuous AI assessments keep students engaged at their skill level. 3.Instant Feedback: AI tutors provide prompt feedback, aiding student learning. 4.Gamified Learning:Points, badges, and rewards make learning enjoyable. 5. Data Insights:AI offers real-time student progress and predictive analytics. 6.Skill Development:AI helps students create personalized skill development plans. 7. Accessibility:AI enhances inclusivity with text-to-speech and closed captions. 8.Continuous Improvement:AI identifies gaps and trends, keeping ed tech updated.