Artificial intelligence (AI) presents promising opportunities for educators to leverage technologies to boost student learning outcomes.
However, it is crucial that the introduction and use of AI in the classroom are done in an ethical manner.
Here’s how you can use practical applications of AI to help students while establishing guidelines for its fair and transparent use.
Testing Knowledge
AI tools have the potential to assist with assessment creation and provide more evaluation opportunities for students.
With AI Test Builders like Quizgecko or Outgrow, educators can input study materials, lesson plans, or learning goals, and it will automatically generate assessment questions focused on those topics
This is a great time-saving tool for educators, compared to manually creating tests and quizzes. It also allows students to have more practice with assessment-style questions, helping reinforce their knowledge.
However, human oversight is still critical to ensure the quality and fairness of AI-generated tests. Educators should still review any AI-generated quizzes before issuing them to students. This allows teachers to catch any errors, biases, or questions that may need tweaking. It’s also important to inform students that quiz content was AI-created for transparency.
Maintaining Engagement Levels
Keeping students motivated and engaged with course material is important to effective learning, and AI has emerging applications to help make education more interactive, personalized, and enjoyable for students.
One way AI can promote engagement is through educational games. Companies like CodeMonkey and DragonBox have developed AI-powered games for teaching coding and math concepts. These games incorporate adaptive learning technology to adjust the difficulty and offer hints based on each student’s demonstrated skills. By making learning more dynamic and responding to individuals’ needs, AI can help motivate students to keep playing and learning.
AI also allows for virtual tutors, interactive storytelling, and other innovations that aim to be more relatable and fun for students. While traditional textbooks and lectures have their place, adding AI-enhanced interactive activities can help reinforce skills while maintaining high engagement.
It’s important that human educators design AI games and applications to align with educational goals, not just entertainment value. But when thoughtfully developed, AI has the potential to boost student motivation and interest in learning by making it a more enjoyable experience tailored to their needs.
Assisting Learning
Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence have emerging potential to provide personalized explanations and answer student questions as they learn course material.
For example, a ChatGPT could be integrated into an online learning platform or textbook app. Students could then ask the chatbot questions about concepts they are struggling with and receive tailored explanations or examples to promote understanding.
The AI behind these chatbots aims to understand students’ questions and provide helpful, relevant responses. However, it is critical that the information and explanations provided by AI chatbots are unbiased, factually accurate, and appropriately transparent. Students should be clearly informed they are interacting with an AI assistant, not a human tutor.
When thoughtfully implemented, AI chatbots have the capability to supplement student learning by offering 24/7 availability for customized explanations at each learner’s pace.
However human oversight is essential to verify quality, spot errors, and uphold transparency standards.
Tracking Progress
Artificial intelligence has the potential to assist with monitoring and evaluating student progress over time.
Applications like Educater leverage AI to analyze students’ performance on various assessments and assignments. By detecting patterns and trends, the AI can pinpoint knowledge gaps or skills that certain students are struggling with compared to the overall class performance.
For example, the AI could identify that a subset of students is consistently answering questions about fractions incorrectly. This would cue the teacher that those students need additional help with that math concept. By surfacing these insights, Educater and similar AI apps aim to help teachers provide targeted intervention and support to students who need it most.
However, with these tools collecting some much data on students, strict protocols must be established to protect student privacy. It should be anonymized before AI processing to remove all personal identifiers, and the insights generated should focus on broad trends and patterns, not on profiling individual students.
With these proper privacy safeguards, AI-enabled progress tracking can be an impactful tool for understanding gaps and personalizing education.
Featured image: metamorworks, iStock.
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