AI in Education: The End of Schools As We Know Them?

Watch the video!

The future of education is one of three options:

1. having AI do all we want and becoming useless,
2. fully controlling students,
3. or providing all the help and material they need for a better but different education.

If it ends up being one of the first two options, I’m pretty sure we’d all drop out of school quickly, and it would be the start of The Matrix. I’m optimistic it will be the third option. P.S. We discussed that with Luis Serrano in a lengthy podcast episode if you are curious!

AI is a shift in education that offers amazing opportunities for personalized learning, efficiency in teaching, and access to education for all ages. This technology will change not only how and what we learn but also the skills we need for the future.

Oh, and spoiler alert: we might become dependent on AI, but that would be nothing new. We are dependent on electricity, our cars, and the Internet. This is just another technological step towards a better quality of life. That is if you leverage it properly! And don’t worry about that; my videos and newsletter help you understand and leverage new AI technologies!

Let’s dive into how real companies, real products and real people are already using AI to change the education system, how one can leverage AI to learn more and finish with some tips for educators and professors.

How is AI changing ‘what’ we learn?

The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, believes that programming is no longer a useful skill for future workers. The more AI advances, the more everyone is now a programmer. And I completely agree with him. Things are changing faster than ever with a shift towards more general communication skills.

Things we learn in school are always evolving, even though they evolve quite slowly in University, from my experience. Anyway, we now have a calculator to do basic math. Once we understand multiplications and divisions, we no longer have to do them by hand. We have a computer with Antidote to correct our grammar. Once we understand how it works and how to write, we can use Antidote to double-check us.

Shortly, we’ll use AI to do many, many things for us. And when I say shortly, I don’t mean in years; I mean it’s already started. Sure, you should never trust it blindly, just like you should not assume Antidote made your text perfect. It’s just another tool in your toolset, and you need to use it.

So, what else will AI change? Well, I unfortunately cannot give you the final answer, but what I can say is that it will have a huge impact on what type of skills we need to learn, just like programming. Most technical skills will become increasingly obsolete as technical people transition towards more managing roles, overseeing automated work, and reviewing and correcting it. Even I use AI to code most of my work, adapting and reviewing it.

Programming is just one example of leveraging AI to replace traditional technical work that we already see. I also use it for various paperwork or brainstorming post ideas and improving my videos, asking if my current script is clear enough or for things that could be added to improve it. AI will be applied similarly in all industries. We will learn to leverage AI to code rather than learning to code, likewise for doing most work-related tasks. It will just be more efficient to supervise and correct than to do from zero. As long as someone checks, edits, and improves the results.

Still, we must learn various useful skills, even if we don’t use them, or else the hallucination issue can become quite problematic. I’m glad I learned all the basic maths, even though it’s rarely useful. I’m also glad I learned to write; otherwise, I couldn’t have made this channel. School and learning new skills are useful, but the way we learn is dramatically changing, again, thanks to artificial intelligence.

How is AI changing ‘how’ we learn?

I am not referring to the video I shared earlier in which a school in China leveraged AI to control its students. AI can also be used for good. Instead of having a professor teach 50 students, we can have one professor per student. We can deliver personalized feedback, personalized exercises, and personalized everything.

I also think online education is going to dominate and change everything.

Of course, being in person, making connections, making friends, and all other social aspects of school are super important, especially at an early age. But online education, especially coupled with online communities, allows us to both scale learning and, paradoxically, make it more tailored to each student. Platforms like Khan Academy already use AI to adapt to each student’s learning pace, offering personalized exercises and feedback. This is much better than just having a grade, and if you pass at 60%, you go to the next year. This means you didn’t understand nearly half of the course! We can do much better…

If you can afford it, hiring a tutor is the current solution for better personalized learning for most students. Well, we can also have AI tutors for a fraction of the price to help you learn and practice almost anything. And it won’t judge you or lose its patience ever. Duolingo uses chatbots to help language learners practice conversations. They can even simulate conversations with language learners in multiple languages, offering corrections and suggestions in real-time. This makes learning a new language more accessible and personalized than ever before. Now that I think of it, I might try Spanish again!

Khan Academy does the same for their courses, and we at Towards AI also have our own AI tutor that helps you learn AI along with our courses and articles. I can say from first-hand experience that these tutors are not perfect yet, but they are so much better than not using them, and they will keep improving.

We can have better interactive platforms like SimSnap, a project focusing on collaborative learning in middle school life science classes. It uses tablets to support simulations of biological systems, enhancing understanding of complex topics through interactive learning. I would’ve loved that for my chemistry classes in college.

And then there’s learning through video games, where AI is the cool teacher that lets you play Minecraft in class. Some already use AI in educational video games like Minecraft to create dynamic STEM learning environments. By analyzing learners’ behaviours and scientific observations within the game, the AI helps students explore simulated environments that are hard to explore otherwise — like exoplanets — where they can conduct experiments, take measurements, and build habitats, enhancing their understanding of complex scientific concepts through interactive and engaging gameplay. Imagine having your child want to play a game that is actually useful to them and teaches them cool stuff! And I’m not talking about boring games but ones children actually want to play, like Minecraft.

That was all for the more general stuff… Now, let’s look into how people learning, whether children or you, can leverage AI to learn more and more efficiently, which is important if we don’t want to end up in The Matrix!

Leverage AI as a learner/student

When it comes to learning something, I believe you need two things: Google and ChatGPT. You can do anything with those two things. Of course, as with everything, don’t blindly trust ChatGPT or even Google, but you can ask it about anything and speed up your learning process or just quickly double-check something you are unsure about. ChatGPT is like a better Google. I also strongly suggest using ChatGPT Plus because you can ask it to look online for up-to-date information. And the results are much better, too.

For instance, I use ChatGPT daily for youtube and my work as a programmer in AI. Whenever I need to start over a coding-related task or implement a new feature, I start with ChatGPT to have a working template and then improve it. It’s just so efficient instead of starting from scratch or from code you find online needing adaptation. It skips this step, adapting it to your use case. I also use it to brainstorm ideas for content or parts of my videos and blogs I can improve. For example, I had finished the script for this article, and it suggested I talk a bit more about online courses based on what I told it about myself, which I think is a great suggestion.

I used to take online courses while also attending University. It helped me a lot. Learning from different professors and learning methods is super important for ensuring that you really understand. Now, couple it with ChatGPT, and it’s just even more amazing. Well, in fact, you probably don’t even need the University part anymore other than for the paper it gives.

And, just like me, following English courses when you speak French or another language might be tough. Here, you can return to using ChatGPT to better understand assessment instructions by inputting specific parts of the instructions into ChatGPT to get alternative explanations and personalized guidance. This breaks down complex instructions into a more manageable, step-by-step process. This barrier is just one of the many that AI breaks down in education.

If I were in university or college again, I’d probably be on ChatGPT all the time. Creating targeted practice by feeding it my homework or initial quiz results. I could even ask all my dumb questions without fear of being judged, which I know discourages many, including me. There are tons of ways we can use even just ChatGPT to learn more. And I’m not even talking about all the extra online tools that exist for students.

Just remember, AI might be smart, but it once thought a dog was a muffin. So, always double-check its work!

There are tons of cool new stuff for students, but what about teachers? Well, it’s even better.

Leverage AI as an educator

Teachers can also leverage ChatGPT to do tons of work for them. It can help them correct copies assuming they double-check, brainstorm exercise ideas for students, help adapt examples for different classes, generate quiz questions based on the course’s material, create interactive learning modules and much more. For the new teachers, you can send your course material in PDF and ask it to generate questions students may ask to prepare yourself better, giving the students’ background knowledge with it.

A teacher can use it to upscale or keep the resources up-to-date if they are working with coding libraries or other evolving topics.

I personally use it to simplify my lessons and videos, asking it to explain concepts clearly or check if anything is hard to understand in my videos. I also often use it in my research to summarize or look for things I could add to improve my lesson or video.

But that’s just me. Here’s what Luis Serrano, an experienced online educator working at Cohere, mentioned about using AI for teaching…

Finally, teachers, universities and online platforms are also using AI in analytics to predict student performance and dropout rates better, helping to provide interventions to support at-risk students. For online learning platforms, we even use it to give the right learning format to students, tracking if they seem to enjoy videos or articles more and to give them more of the content they seem to have difficulties understanding. And those current applications are all mostly relying on ChatGPT. Much more is coming and is built around that involving artificial intelligence technologies.

Before I conclude this post, I want to warn you about using AI to learn new skills. Don’t trust an AI blindly. It’s not intelligent, it’s not conscious, and it’s not human! I always double-check with trusted sources, either on Google or my pairs. It’s a powerful tool you can leverage, but you still need to be careful and ensure you truly understand and master something and not copy-paste from ChatGPT. There are also biases and privacy concerns that we need to be conscious of and deal with, especially from the government side.

Conclusion

Regardless, AI will only be more present in education, whether we want it or not. Let’s hope it’s for the better. The only thing I am convinced of is the traditional education system will not remain the same.

Even I learned more about my professional domain online than during school. Of course, school was super useful, especially for the social part and, I assume, learning to live in society. However, university and graduate studies will drop in popularity when companies understand that a paper doesn’t mean that much.

Let me know if you agree or disagree and your thoughts on how AI impacts the current education system. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’ll see you either in the next email or in the next one, demystifying a new research or industry that AI is transforming!