How AI will change education

In this post, I interview instructional designer Dania Chadwick about her experience designing engaging online courses by using artificial intelligence.

David: Thanks for agreeing to talk to me Dania! I have been looking forward to this interview for a long time. One of the things I really look forward to talking about is your work on making online classes feel alive and interactive to students by using AI. But maybe you can start with a brief introduction of yourself?

Dania: I’m a web developer and instructional designer with a background in storytelling and drama. I’ve worked with computers since I was eight and have always tried to work with computers to help humans do what we do naturally but faster, better, and more thoroughly. I want to enable people to do more of what they love and be happier doing it. I come from a family of “makers” – we build things with our hands and use our imaginations to solve problems and make change. As the oldest of three kids, I was the parent helper when my brothers and sisters were very young. I learned to use a variety of tools to create opportunities for them to have adventures and learn from their play. As a teenager, I started to notice that the world around us was getting more and more complex and we needed new tools to solve problems, create new experiences, and innovate at the same rate of change. In the digital age, I wanted to help us all “make” those new tools, and keep the world interesting for people of all ages.

David: Awesome! Thanks so much for sharing. A part of what you do is create live courses that are delivered on platforms like FlippedClassroom.io. For those who aren’t familiar with them, can you explain what a flipped class looks like?

Dania: A flipped classroom works by using video technology to let students watch lectures at home before coming to class, so the teacher can have more class time to work on activities and hands-on learning. When I began designing the online courses, there was no real lecture hall experience – the teacher simply set up a screen to display the videos. The teacher was expected to give a lecture, even though they were talking to a computer screen that couldn’t really engage with them.

So what I did was to create an environment where the video could “intelligently” respond to different students’ inputs. This would let the teacher adapt the lecture to specific students and help them to learn as well as possible.

David: What was the goal you had in mind?

Dania: The first thing I wanted to do was to take away the pressure of the teacher having to make sure that every single student in the class was following along. I wanted the lecture to help people, and not hinder them. The purpose of the flipped class is to help people learn better and faster. I believe that anyone should be able to learn in their own way. For some, watching the videos is a great way to learn, for others it is better to listen, and still others learn better from doing the activities. A smart classroom that adapts to the student’s pace and style of learning helps everyone to learn better.

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What you just read is actually not a real conversation I had with a human. What you see above is a fake interview generated by OpenAI's new GPT3 model (https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/). All I did was feed in the part in italic, and then the AI generated the rest of the interview itself.

How will AI change education? I don't know, but I am sure that we are in for a ride ??.