How Is AI Changing The Education Industry?

Since the time of Jan Amos Komensky, the educational system hasn’t changed much. The conventional class-and-lesson system familiar to everyone around the world stays present and relevant today. Even during the Covid pandemics it solely moved into the online environment, keeping teacher-student relationships. The long-lasting rumor that technology will replace teachers has not been proven.

Yet, digital technology is transforming the way teachers and educational facilities do their job. Most of the digital instruments that teachers use from video conferencing tools to learning management systems are based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Being the foundation for diverse apps and technologies, AI helps automate the majority of educational routine work, create complex e-learning materials, and much more.

In this article, we’ll look into how AI is changing the education industry and facilitates the teaching, learning, and organizational processes for teachers, students, and administration of educational institutions.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education

The use of AI in the education sector is growing in popularity. In the heavily digitized world educators are looking for new ways to engage their students and enhance their learning experience. AI helps to adjust educational programs, making them more personalized and of higher quality. Apart from facilitating training materials to students, AI helps teachers to alleviate administrative work, lesson preparation, and test marking, by sending quick notifications to students, automatically checking tasks, and much more.

In its recent research, Global Market Insights Inc. states that Artificial Intelligence in Education Market accounted for more than $1 bln in 2020 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 40% between 2021 to 2027. This significant rise is explained by the changes the education sector faced during the Covid-19 pandemic when the demand for online learning platforms peaked. According to Unicef data, 83% of countries used online platforms for delivering education while schools weren’t accessible for students due to the pandemic.

How AI Can Help Education

Artificial Intelligence often comes as an integral part of various Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), Course Management Systems (CMS), e-learning platforms, mobile, web, and desktop educational applications. In these digital solutions, AI can be used for a number of purposes. Here are the most significant use cases.

Facilitation of Administrative Activities

According to stats from Education Counts, teachers in Singapore, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand spend on average 8% of their class time on administrative tasks, 13% on keeping order in the classroom, and 79% on teaching and learning. It’s possible to speed up and automate most of the organizational and administrative tasks with the help of AI.

Artificial Intelligence can automatically grade tests such as multiple-choice questions, fill the blanks, etc. Apart from assessing students’ work, AI can fill in various papers, manage teaching materials, organize resources for lectures, adjust schedules, and prepare overall progress reports. This way, by utilizing AI in their daily routine, teachers have more time for teaching-related tasks and tend to feel less overwhelmed with tedious repetitive administrative work.

AI-Assisted Learning

Artificial Intelligence can empower teachers to create learning experiences that are supportive to each student and thus highly personalized. For this, AI technology examines a student’s learning style and detects the studying patterns. Based on these patterns, it can make suggestions on how to improve students’ learning process, automatically adjust training tasks, and schedule revision of course materials.

AI-assisted learning encourages students to take more responsibility for their education. Students can study their subjects of interest in smaller, easier-to-learn chunks, with the necessary amount of repetition, and in a carefully structured study plan. This way, they are likely to experience fewer troubles with self-studying as the materials are available 27/4 and are provided in a clear and tailored to a student form.

Smart Content

By using AI technology, methodologists can broadly diversify studying techniques and materials. Training materials don’t have to come solely in the form of a paper book today. Instead, they can be digitized and replenished with additional content such as convenient navigation with chapter summaries, videos/audios, quick tests, flashcards, gamification elements, or even augmented reality elements.

This wide range of interactive and visual components can help students more effectively comprehend the studied subjects. Meanwhile, by using AI-empowered study apps, teachers can better engage students in the educational process and form a positive attitude toward studying.

Detailed Feedback

AI-based educational apps and platforms usually include the feature of tracking each student’s achievement. They effectively monitor current, intermediate, and final students’ academic performance and provide valuable feedback on their success. This way, teachers can quickly find out if their students have any knowledge gaps and re-teach the needed materials.

Moreover, these apps allow teachers to share the performance results of each student with their parents or various educational institutions, providing detailed data for the entire period of study.

Examples of How AI Can Be Used in Education

Here are some examples of how software developers implement AI to enhance their educational applications and platforms.

• Duolingo is a popular language-learning platform that utilizes AI to personalize the studying experience for its students. It provides learners with diverse language exercises and based on the number of mistakes made offers to re-study some word collocations or grammatical materials. Moreover, Duolingo includes a language identification feature, therefore, students can also practice their pronunciation in the app, covering 4 types of speech activity – listening, reading, writing, and speaking.
• Querium is a platform for mastering STEM skills that allow students to prepare for college exams and much more. An AI-based virtual tutor analyses students’ weaknesses and difficulties in solving math problems and provides them with step-by-step explanations, customized to each student.
• EdApp represents a mobile learning management system. It utilizes AI to streamline corporate learning, making it simple and as seamless as possible. The app uses algorithms to evaluate the studied data and suggests how to present it the best way, including content recommendations, more effective translations, studying materials personalization, and much more.
• Google Classroom is a popular platform that allows setting assignments, submitting and marking students’ work, and performing many other teaching activities. Recently Google Classroom creators introduced an AI-based feature that transforms teaching content into interactive assignments. The platform can automatically grade students’ work, provide real-time feedback on their performance, offer problem-solving hints, and much more.

Bottom Line

The education industry is experiencing a considerable impact of AI today. The technology forms an integral part of many educational apps and platforms that help enhance teaching, organizing, and administrative activities in classrooms as well as in educational facilities.

During the pandemic outbreak, the demand for online teaching solutions has soared and it’s expected that their popularity will remain high. Therefore, many businesses and startups are turning to eLearning software development services and investing in building their own educational software.

Looking for AI development services? Do not hesitate to contact us and we will be glad to assisst you with your AI project.