How can AI improve learning and teaching in school?

Is there something positive about AI in school and university? It has become customary to see students relying on AI tools for learning and homework purposes, and this is not entirely bad, as some people might say.

The way information is accessible has shaped thestudents’ techniques and homework skills. For instance, older generations used to attend the local library in order to find a specific book about a topic to write an essay.

Years later, Millennials and Gen Z students mostly relied on digital, informative and collaborative websites such as Wikipedia (a great illustration of the Web 2.0) for school homework.

Nowadays, it seems like high school and college students utilize digital tools powered by AI in order to get access to information and to ask them to write their own essays.

How many students use AI tools?

Recent studies from the Digital Education Council have shown that 86% of students have used AI in their studies, and 54% of them use these tools on a weekly basis.

Among these students, the majority of them have used ChatGPT (66%), all along with Grammarly and Microsoft Copilot. 

In fact, the main actions executed by students on AI platforms are:

• Search for information (69%).
• Check grammar (42%).
• Summarize documents (33%).
• Paraphrase a document (28%).
• Create a first draft (24%).

Although the majority of the students are already familiar with AI platforms, 80% of the surveyed students stated that their universities lack appropriate AI programs and subjects. Thus, they don’t feel completely confident about their literacy in Artificial Intelligence.

Benefits of AI in school

Teachers would most likely reject the utilization of AI at school. In fact, 35% of high school teachers have stated in a survey that “these tools do more harm than good.” Furthermore, 24% of middle school teachers and 19% of elementary school teachers agree with this statement.

Regarding this amount of rejection, it’s important to mention all the benefits that Artificial Intelligence can have in educational environments.

As a matter of fact, UNESCO has written a report, “AI and education: guidance for policy makers,” explaining all the positive practices of AI at school, helping in three main subjects: Teaching, Learning and system management.

Enhancing learning with AI in school

Different AI-powered technologies can help students to improve their learning process. For instance, there are Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that work by providing step-by-step instructions, individualized for each student through topics in structured objects such as mathematics or physics. As the student engages with the learning process, the ITS adjusts the level of difficulty and provides guidance according to the individual student’s strengths and weaknesses.

On the other hand, Dialogue-based tutoring systems (DBTS) are another example of UNESCO. They use natural language processing and other AI techniques to simulate a spoken tutorial dialogue between human tutors and students as they work step-by-step through online tasks. This type of technology provides generated questions instead of the complete tutorial in order to guide the students to discover the right answer by themselves.

Empowering teachers with AI

Nowadays, many AI applications for teachers aim to help with the workloads by automating tasks such as assessment, plagiarism detection, administration and feedback. Therefore, it is often argued that this type of technology should free up time for teachers to invest in other tasks like providing effective support to students.

As AI tools become increasingly available in classrooms, teacher roles will have to change. In this scenario, they will have to acquire new competencies in order to properly work with AI-powered tools.

To give a promising example, AI could help to monitor asynchronous discussion forums where students give responses to given tasks, ask their tutors about course materials, and engage in collaborative learning opportunities. These forums usually have numerous posts, which must be moderated, and that’s how AI can help.

AI on administration and management

UNESCO’s report has shown that AI technologies are increasingly being used to facilitate the management and delivery of education by automating aspects of school administration and helping with admissions, time tabling, attendance, homework monitoring and school inspections.

Moreover, it is possible to implement learning analytics used to analyze the big data generated in learning management systems to provide information for teachers, administrators and students. For example, these learning analytics could predict which students are at risk of failure, and consequently teachers would be able to process this information and give personalized tutoring to these students.

In this context, UNESCO gave a few promising examples of AI technology for education management, being the educational chatbots the first illustration.

How WorkAdventure collaborates with learning and AI

WorkAdventure proposes an interactive and collaborative virtual world that can thoroughly emulate the physical classroom. In these digital learning environments, students and teachers are embodied by avatars that can interact with each other by approaching themselves, triggering a video call.

WorkAdventure strongly believes in the positive impact that AI technologies can have for humankind, especially for educators. Hence, we integrate OpenAI-powered bots with which students and tutors can speak and ask them to execute determined tasks to reduce the burden of high workloads.

Thanks to this interactive and intelligent interface, it is possible to develop digital classrooms with a big potential in terms of gamified learning, an innovative teaching-learning technique that combines two different dimensions -games and education- into one big system that enhances students’ concentration, understanding, critical thinking and teamwork. This is why different educational institutions like University of Rennes and UnivAQ have trusted this initiative.