The availability of AI – especially in the form of online tools and software – has brought about different benefits in education, along with some inevitable challenges and downsides.
Understanding the benefits and challenges of AI in education can help us find the right way to utilize it. Knowing the benefits, you’ll utilize AI to get them. And knowing the challenges, you’ll take the necessary steps to avoid them.
In this post, let’s take a look at both in detail.
1. Benefits of AI in Education
Here are some of the benefits of using AI in education.
a. AI can help teachers create a personalized and immersive learning environment for their students
Students can learn a lot better when the teaching process is specifically tailored to their speed and progress. When a one-size-fits-all approach is taken, a lot of students can fall behind due to not being able to understand everything in its generic way.
AI can help educators and teachers to overcome this problem. They can create a customized learning approach for each student. The personalized and customized approach helps students learn everything at their own pace.
To exemplify what we’ve said above, consider the broad example of ITS (Intelligent Tutoring Systems).
ITS are basically computer programs/systems that utilize AI to analyze the performance or progress of the students and give them customized feedback or instruction.
b. AI can help students understand study material easily
Nowadays, there are various AI chatbots and assistants (like ChatGPT) that you can find and use easily on the Internet. The high-end tools in this category are based on cutting-edge AI technologies like GPT 4 and 3.5.
By using tools like these i.e., AI assistants and chatbots, students can understand complicated study material with ease. For example, if there is a particularly complex topic that a student is having trouble grasping, they can ask the AI assistant about it and understand it in their own way.
For example, using an online AI assistant, a student could:
- Ask for examples of a specific concept
- Ask for a particular perspective of the concept to be explained
- Ask for a specific tone or tenor in the explanation
Doing the same thing with a human teacher is, while possible, not very plausible and practically repeatable.
This is a good benefit of AI in education.
c. AI can help students easily and efficiently create assignments
When used correctly, AI can play a helpful and assistive role in the process of creating assignments. For the different steps in writing an assignment, there are different tools and online utilities that students can use.
To give an example,
- When writing assignments, students can take help from content generators to create prompts to expand upon. In other words, students can ask a content generator to create some limited content on the topic. Then, the students can use that content to get an idea of what to discuss in the assignment itself. They can then write their own content based on the prompt.
- When they’re done writing the assignment, students can get help from an AI-based grammar checker to find and remove grammar/spelling errors from the content.
- Plagiarism is often an issue that students have to deal with after writing an assignment. Should there be any accidental plagiarism in the write-up, students can use an online paraphrasing tool to fix it. Paraphrasing content is a popular and effective way of dealing with accidental plagiarism.
These are some of the benefits of AI in education.
2. Downsides of AI in Education
Now, let’s move on to discuss the downsides.
a. AI can make students too dependent on it
If the use of AI is unregulated, it can end up making students too reliant on it.
Consider the example of using AI for research and understanding topics, etc., that we mentioned above. While they can be used in a calculated way to understand complex topics, they can become a danger if they are used incessantly. Using them too much would mean that the student could discard the other, more reliable ways of research and instead focus on just the AI tools.
The same goes for content generation and improvement. Content generation has to be constructively and sparingly utilized to get a boost in the writing process. But it can be very easy and tempting for students to use them and create the entire content in toto. If that happens, the students would become too dependent on the tools, and they would not be able to work without them.
b. AI can damage student’s creativity
When AI takes over the writing process, it can damage the student’s ability to create personalized and original content. For example, if someone uses a content generator to build a base for their write-up, they’ll basically be using the same type of stuff that everyone else is. No one knows how many other people may have used the tool for that same purpose.
In cases like this, the originality and creativity of the student can get suppressed, and their work can end up looking generic.
c. AI can reduce the helpful engagement and direct contact between students and teachers
While things like ITS are considered to be beneficial and everything, there is one big downside to them. They reduce the overall contact and interaction that students have with their teachers. This interaction can be very helpful for both since it can allow students to get a better understanding of the study material, and it can help teachers to evaluate their students better.
But when automated systems are used for teaching purposes, this can’t be done.
Final Thoughts: How Should AI be Used in Education
The correct way to approach AI usage in education is to keep it balanced. They should be used in such a way that the benefits are availed of and the downsides avoided.
Here are some ways in which this can be ensured:
- When it comes to using automated teaching platforms, it should be done in tandem with the traditional teaching method i.e., where an individual is involved in the process.
- When the need arises for online tools to be used, only the high-quality ones should be used so that the outputs and results are correct and accurate.
- The tools should be used completely in an assistive capacity i.e., when it comes to writing assignments.
- At times, using tools should be completely left out so that students can develop their own skills.
Be the first to leave a review.