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The recent uptick in the availability and prevalence of chatbots has sparked heated debates on the steadily growing influence of AI on human life. This has especially created waves in academic circles, where concerns relating to numerous aspects of student AI usage are yet to be addressed. While the advent of chatbots is not recent, strides taken in improving their response times, quality of interactions, and extent of their databases have made them increasingly prevalent. This is important, especially in the case of chatbot AIs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has become immensely popular. While this is a watershed moment for technology, it is especially impactful in the case of education. Given chatbots’ skyrocketing popularity among students, AI in education is only bound to create more ripples than ever before. However, AI in education is not merely restricted to chatbots, with several older and newer tools already making tangible differences in both students’ and teachers’ lives.
With the potential to change the way humans learn, the increasing usage of chatbots and other AI tools by students in their educational journeys has led to mixed reactions among educators and developers alike. While AI might simplify concepts and hold the potential to enhance understanding among pupils, its ability to draft essays and write papers threatens academic integrity and student creativity. So how can one gauge the impact that AI will have on academics at large? That’s precisely the prime focus in the upcoming sections of the article. From apparent advantages to impending concerns, the exploration of why AI’s reach has always been beyond the simple chatbot is crucial to helping educators formulate an appropriate response to the ever-increasing influence of AI in education.
Analyzing the Influence of AI on Education
While AI has had positive effects on education, its advancements must be closely monitored.
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With the advent of ChatGPT and its release to the public, students have increasingly taken to the chatbot to both explore the capabilities of the AI and get help with homework. This reveals two things about students—they’re quick to pick up newer technologies in comparison to their instructors and have an innate curiosity to explore new tools to help with their learning. The speed with which students adopt technologies often necessitates their teachers to do the same, so they may appropriately assess and predict the impact of these technologies on their students’ progress. While ChatGPT has made the pedagogical community revisit concerns surrounding plagiarism and ethics, it has also revealed areas that teachers might have to tweak to ensure students learn better in the classroom. However, unlike recent panic-addled responses to chatbot AIs, it must be noted that artificial intelligence has had considerable influence on education for quite some time. Beyond chatbots and writing, here’s how AI tools have been deployed in pedagogical practice:
1. Visualization of Information
An important area where AI has been very useful in education is in visualizing information. The application of VR (virtual reality) has been fine-tuned with the blending of AI. This has made interactions with simulated realities smarter and more perceptive. Students can visually interact with complex concepts in their curriculum, and smarter VR tools have allowed for a greater impact on student minds, ensuring better learning outcomes. While VR isn’t exactly a new piece of technology, its union with AI and AI-esque tools has given it an edge over other modes of teaching students concepts that require rich visual input.
2. Interactive Learning & Gamification
With both interactive learning and the gamification of processes having caught steam in the past few years, AI has found an increased role to play in enhancing early childhood learning. The deployment of AI learning has amplified the prospects of childhood education and has shown promise in teaching children basic academic skills. While this is no replacement for a human teacher, it has certainly enhanced the effectiveness of learning in children set to begin their academic journeys. Beyond early childhood education, gamification of learning at large, especially with AI has also shown promise in enhancing student engagement across the board.
3. Management in Education
AI has been a useful tool for managing schools and other educational institutions. The usage of AI for the collation of student data and reports has been a handy tool for management to track student progress and store information with seamless accessibility. Moreover, AI can also help educational institutions with budgeting, transportation, scheduling, and creating easy-to-read reports for parents to judge their child’s progress.
The above three applications elucidate that AI has been and clearly continues to be influential in education. While chatbot AIs and writing generators have taken to recent prominence, other forms of AI have been around for longer and have also been less disruptive. This provides insight into the fact that AI can indeed be used to improve current educational methodologies without having to compromise academic ethics and the quality of learning.
The Future of AI in Education
Rapid advancements in AI and information will continue to make their way to the education sector.
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Despite the looming concerns of AI-influenced “cheating” and an increased influx of AI-written essays making their way into schools and universities, AI, whether in the form of chatbots or other learning aids, is here to stay. That being said, there exist numerous options for educators and developers to prime AI and its rapidly advancing technologies to the benefit of both teachers and students. One of the applications of AI in education is to keep content up-to-date. With publications often including updates to information only through newer editions, content revamps are spaced apart. However, with AI-curated content, teachers can rest assured that the content they teach their students is updated regularly through automatic mechanisms.
AI can also help with creating adaptive learning programs for students based on their unique requirements and track records. When combined with conventional teaching methods, this can ensure students remain motivated and engaged with pedagogical techniques that are relatable. While chatbots might be of concern regarding academic integrity and cheating, using the basis of chatbot AI to help curate personalized educational content can go a long way in improving student performance over the long term. AI in education and learning can also be integrated into current e-learning platforms to ensure better reach and more tailored learning acceptable to students with special requirements. In the continuing trend of moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, AI can support continued efforts in this direction.
Why Chatbot & AI Vigilance is Essential
Assessing the usage and impact of AI tools is key to effective implementation of new technologies in education.
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Regardless of the benefits that AI and chatbots present to teaching, educators still need to be vigilant concerning the misuse of AI and the impact it can have on students and their intent to learn. As AI continues to rapidly change the classrooms and student learning environments away from school, a composite understanding and long-term research have to be undertaken to ensure students receive only what’s required, failing which the widespread misuse of technology in the name of education is imminent.