A Parent’s 101 Guide To How AI Will Affect The Future Of Education

What Is AI & Its Ramifications Into Education

Before delving further into AI's role in education, we need to establish what it is. Using UNICEF’s definition, “AI refers to machine-based systems that can, given a set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions that influence real or virtual environments.”
Machine-based systems are manmade. Anything manmade will always have errors and questionable ethics (what can be good for one doesn’t make it good for everybody else). And because AI is continuously developing - standards, parameters, and laws on how it can be used are also developing and trying to catch up.
As a parent, it is your responsibility to be vigilant about how your child uses AI, not just at home but also in the classroom. Just because laws have not been passed or schools have not established any rigid guidelines, it doesn’t mean you cannot be informed to make your own decisions regarding your child’s AI usage. Knowing how AI is currently used in your child’s education will help you understand how it will affect the future of education.

AI Use In Educaiton

In addition to the benefits of increased inclusion (assistive technology allows blind students to have AI read texts to them, multimodal access for children with disabilities), universal access (online classes and degrees available from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer and internet access), and individualized/adapted learning, there’s a long list of how schools are using AI to benefit all parties (school owners, teachers, administrators, and students).

• Administrative Tasks: AI is used in scheduling, recording grades, monitoring power usage in classrooms, budgeting, etc. It helps reduce the teacher’s workload so they can focus on more important things.
• Data and Learning Analytics: AI can help analyze and interpret students’ data for the teachers to make informed decisions about their class’ learning. For example, the teacher can change her lesson plan and employ certain techniques if data interprets that the class performs better when doing so, e.g. Gamification for enhanced student engagement. Even lesson plan creation can be AI-assisted - the teacher can save a lot of time scouring resources for the best way to teach her students.
• Early Childhood Education: there are interactive games that are useful in teaching basic academic skills to children - from learning their colors, shapes, and songs, to writing their letters and numbers.
• Exam Integrity & Validity: helps the educator create questions that foster learning and not just memorization. AI can ensure that there is no cheating in class by randomizing test questions - it will be the same test questions but in different numbers per test.
• Language Learning: apps like DuoLingo ABC, Little Pim, etc., are using AI to enhance and personalize children’s learning.
• Learning Apps: platforms like Brainly, Thinkster Math, provide a perfect mash of AI and human-personalized tutors to help your child learn, do their homework, and even test prep, etc.

There are many more examples such as plagiarism detection, writing assistance, and professional development for educators (seminars, webinars, and others are accessible), providing culturally relevant content, to name a few. 

The Future Of Education With AI & Potential Concerns

AI can only become better from this point forward if governments help safeguard its usage. We cannot tell what other advancements AI can provide for education as discoveries and experiments are happening every day. But if we take a closer look at what AI has done so far and surmise how these can be improved, then we can have a good bird’s eye view of what the future of AI in education will look like. This should also include knowing the current pitfalls of AI.

AI already exceeds the normal human brain in certain aspects - for example, GPT-4 scores higher than 88% of humans on the LSAT where it got 163/180 (the average human score is 152). Its brain capacity can be described as a standard postgraduate that can still make errors and isn’t perfect. While full reliance on AI is bound to happen, several concerns need to be addressed for the future of AI in education to be positive.

• Accuracy: when you use ChatGPT, there is a disclaimer, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.” Plus, their newest information is from January 2022 so if you need something from February 2022 onward, you won’t be able to find an answer from it.
• Content Bias: AI uses the content that is fed by the engineers who made it so they can choose which content to leave out or include, hence, running the risk of not presenting a complete picture.
• Data Protection and Privacy/Surveillance: there are always third parties interested in data - whether it's your child’s learning patterns, what subjects your child prefers or their class schedules.
• Plagiarism: because you don’t get to make the sentences yourself, AI might be getting it word per word from someone else.
• Systems using poor pedagogic reasoning e.g. to increase the pace of instruction for some students and to reduce it for others: What if your child is not feeling well? What if your child did not get enough sleep the night before to perform well for that day? What if your child did not eat breakfast? There are so many small factors that need to be considered in your child’s learning that an AI cannot fathom unless that data is fed - and can affect AI’s judgment in your child’s learning.
• Loss of critical thinking skills: the ability to come up with answers to difficult problems is uniquely human - all factors need to be considered and the most humane solution is chosen when possible. AI is becoming more and more intelligent by the second and be used in the future to provide answers to difficult situations.

It’s very important to ask your child’s school or future school for a deep dive into how their institution uses AI. Your awareness is critical to help your child navigate AI and use it to better their education and not the other way around.