AI in Education: Aiding Educators or Replacing Them? Expert Views

The incredible growth of AI, particularly since the introduction of ChatGPT, has sparked excitement and apprehension across various sectors, including education.

In the educational sector, while some view AI as a potential replacement for teachers, emphasizing its efficiency in tasks like standardized content delivery and assessment, others maintain that the unique qualities of human educators, such as empathy, creativity, and critical thinking, remain irreplaceable.

This article examines these contrasting viewpoints by investigating the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI in education, as articulated by experts in the field.

AI in Education: The Promise

Popular education platforms such as Khan Academy and Duolingo have been experimenting with AI-powered tutoring assistants to provide enhanced support to learners. In fact, according to Sal Khan of Khan Academy, AI in education will be the "biggest positive transformation" the field has ever seen.

How true is this? Let’s examine some of the benefits promised by AI adoption.

1. Personalized Learning

One of the leading benefits of AI in education is the promise of individualizing learning opportunities for students. Traditional education has been premised on instructing students in the same way and on the same content, with limited personalized support provided to students.

AI-powered tools, however, can analyze student performance data to determine which students need additional support and the best ways to aid them. This is particularly crucial when teaching students with disabilities. AI can finally help educators achieve the goal of creating equitable and inclusive learning environments for students with diverse needs.

2. Increased Efficiency

Teachers, in addition to their classroom responsibilities, have a significant amount of administrative responsibility. These responsibilities, such as parent communication, professional development, managing student behavior, completing all kinds of paperwork, and so on, often go unnoticed and underappreciated. Yet, they are essential for the smooth functioning of schools and the education of students.

With AI, teachers can finally offload some of those time-consuming duties to intelligent assistants. This is a welcome improvement because it will allow them to dedicate more quality time to directly working with their students.

3. Access to Educational Resources

One key feature of AI-powered educational platforms is their ability to aggregate and curate a wide range of educational resources from various sources. This includes textbooks, articles, videos, simulations, and interactive exercises.

Thus, AI-powered platforms grant both students and teachers access to a variety of educational resources to create lessons and class presentations, develop learning activities and assessments, generate prompts for classroom discussion, and so on.

At the level of higher education, for instance, Harvard Library aspires to revolutionize research and scholarship by making its curated datasets available through LLM-enabled interfaces so that it can share its legally acquired collection with students and researchers according to the principles of fair use.

4. Improved Engagement and Academic Performance

At the end of the day, all AI applications in education are worthless if they don’t lead to improvements in educational outcomes and academic performance. Thankfully, studies so far suggest that AI-supported classrooms show increased student engagement and greater student achievement when compared to traditional classrooms.

For instance, AI-powered tutoring systems can provide students with immediate assistance and support outside of the classroom. Universities and high schools are already deploying generative AI to provide such support to students, teachers, and professors to enhance their learning outcomes.

AI in Education: Tools for Enhancing Learning

As Vicki Phillips, CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, wrote, “We should not only think about how technology can assist teachers and learners in improving what they’re doing now, but what it means for ensuring that new ways of teaching and learning flourish alongside the applications of AI.”

In this section, we discuss various categories of AI-powered tools for enhancing learning and education.

1. Personalized Learning and Tutoring

This category encompasses tools designed to provide individualized learning experiences tailored to student needs and preferences. These include intelligent tutoring systems like Khanmigo and Duolingo Max that simulate one-on-one tutoring by adapting to student performance and responses and providing personalized feedback.

2. Teacher Support and Efficiency

Tools in this category help alleviate teachers’ workload and enhance the effectiveness of their lessons and tutorials. They offer significant potential for improving job satisfaction and enable them to focus on higher-level tasks like personalized instruction, mentorship, and curriculum development.

For instance, visual tools such as Canva Magic Write and Slidesgo can assist teachers in creating lesson plans, generating presentation slides, designing quizzes, and developing learning materials. Educational video production is also an engaging way for students or any kind of learner to explore topics creatively, enhance retention, and collaborate on multimedia projects, making learning more interactive and dynamic.

There are also AI-powered tools for grading and feedback, administrative tasks, and professional development.

3. Assessment and Feedback

One of the ways AI is bringing innovations to education is by transforming traditional assessment methods and providing more efficient ways to measure student understanding. A platform like Quizizz integrates AI to personalize learning paths and provide intelligent feedback to students.

More so, AI can analyze vast amounts of student data to identify learning trends and predict student performance. These insights are useful for addressing challenges in the learning process. However, as UNESCO points out, a human-centered approach to AI integration that doesn’t perpetuate biases is crucial.

4. Enhancing Access and Equity

AI has the potential to level the playing field and provide all students with equal learning opportunities. For instance, AI tools are useful in the translation of materials into different languages, making content accessible to non-English language learners.

They can also be used to provide the necessary support for students with disabilities as well as bridge the gap of learning for students in underserved communities who suffer limited access to quality education.

AI in Education: The Concerns

"For all the hype about AI replacing teachers, the reality is that teachers are irreplaceable. It is a deeply human endeavor,” says John Spencer, a college professor who speaks on design thinking.

This is a sentiment that has understandably driven antagonism for AI applications in education.

The US Department of Education itself also acknowledges the anxieties surrounding AI in education. However, it stresses the crucial need for human oversight in its applications. Here, we’ll look at some of these concerns.

1. Bias and Misinformation

All AI tools are only as good as how they were trained and the data on which they are trained. Unfortunately, that means AI outputs are often biased and misinformed. This is especially problematic in education, where students rely on AI tools to provide accurate information.

2. Cheating and Academic Integrity

Many educators are rightly concerned about the ease with which students can use AI to cheat. AI tools can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer open-ended, challenging, or strange questions. It defeats the purpose of learning when students don’t truly engage with the material and develop the right skills.

3. Impact on Student Skills and Development

Some educators are concerned that AI could hinder the development of essential skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. It is a real fear that many students may become overly reliant on AI and may not learn to think for themselves or develop the ability to solve problems independently.

4. Job Security

Some teachers are concerned that AI will replace them. While many experts believe that AI is best used as a tool to support, rather than replace, teachers, it is natural for educators to have anxieties surrounding job security in the face of rapid technological advancement. AI specialists like Christine Dumeng of Southern New Hampshire University, though, keep encouraging teachers to embrace the AI-driven future and see it as a partner, not a threat.

5. Rapid Pace of Development

The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 greatly accelerated the adoption of AI-powered tools in several industries, including education. This means that policies and ethical considerations are being addressed on the go and not in advance. More so, many teachers have not fully developed the necessary training and guidance on how to effectively use AI tools.

6. Failure to Address Social Needs

There are serious concerns over AI not being competent enough to address the unique social-emotional needs of all learners. According to Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “Successful schools are inevitably the product of the relationships between adults and students. When technology ignores that, it’s bound to disappoint.”

Conclusion

Our world will continue to be AI-driven, and this is a fact that we must come to terms with quickly. However, while there is a sort of consensus that AI has the potential to be a powerful tool for enhancing teaching and learning, there is also widespread agreement that AI cannot successfully replicate the vital human elements of teaching, such as fostering meaningful relationships and providing emotional support.

As Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education puts it, "Technology is not neutral, and it must be steered by our agency. Technology on our terms is our message."