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Episode: AI Use Case Series: AI in Education [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:18:03

Episode Shownotes

Using AI in education can have a dramatic impact on students and teachers alike. In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer discuss how AI is being applied in education and learning. AI powered education Indeed, AI-powered learning is really exciting people! In this episode we

discuss how hyperpersonalized learning is allowing each individual to learn at their own pace. Continue reading AI Use Case Series: AI in Education [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
The AI Today podcast, powered by PMI, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:09 Speaker_00
Learn about emerging AI trends, best practices, and use cases on making AI work for you today with PMI hosts and expert guests.

00:00:21 Speaker_01
Hello and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Molch.

00:00:25 Speaker_02
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. And you know what's exciting about AI, I think, for folks who are really using it every day, is that we are seeing the benefits of AI in, I would say, very mundane ways, if you want to think about it.

00:00:37 Speaker_02
Not super exciting. We're not talking self-driving cars here or superintelligence systems or robots that can do backflips or any of the crazy things that people think about science fiction wise when you think about AI.

00:00:50 Speaker_02
Nobody made movies in the future about AI and finance or AI and healthcare. That's not how they perceived the future of intelligent machines.

00:01:00 Speaker_02
But the truth of the matter is, is that the ways that AI is providing value today, the intelligent machines are helping in the things that we do on a daily basis.

00:01:11 Speaker_02
You know, I was doing some work for a different thing, looking at entrepreneurship in general, and thinking about people who are now sort of being self-employed. And one of the comments is like, if you really want to solve a problem,

00:01:24 Speaker_02
Solve a daily problem. Solve a problem that people have to face every day. Don't solve a problem that people maybe encounter every once in a while.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
For example, I don't want to go into divergent here, but if you're buying a car, how often do you buy a car? Once every few years, right? Or if you buy a house. But you drive a car every day. So this is the thing about useful things.

00:01:46 Speaker_02
If I only need to worry about a problem in the future, then I'm not going to solve it. The thing that AI is providing value today are the things that we are doing every day. So what we're focusing on in AI today is we are...

00:01:58 Speaker_02
like the word today, we are focusing on the problems people are facing every day and the ways that AI is helping in our daily lives, daily problems.

00:02:07 Speaker_02
So in this series that we've been going through, our AI use case series, we've been exploring specifically how AI is being used and applied in all these different industries to help with some of the daily problems and daily issues and daily needs that we are facing in our lives.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
Exactly. And so our AI use case series was incredibly popular a few years ago when we did it. So we wanted to revisit this series and say, how has this changed?

00:02:32 Speaker_01
How is AI impacting people today for these various use cases and industries that we talk about?

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And maybe it's an industry that you work in and you want to follow it closely, or maybe it's not, but you want to see how other industries are using and applying AI.

00:02:47 Speaker_01
I know that many people that we talk to always, always, always are looking for different use cases. And so that's why we thought it was really important to bring this series back up.

00:02:57 Speaker_01
So if you haven't done so already, subscribe to AI Today so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes, including many in this AI Use Case series. We also have a number of incredible interviews lined up, so definitely subscribe.

00:03:09 Speaker_01
For today's podcast, though, we want to talk about how AI is impacting education.

00:03:13 Speaker_01
And when people think about education, a lot of times they'll think about, you know, that K through 12, but we all, we like to think about education as being this lifelong learner.

00:03:22 Speaker_01
And so how are you in a professional setting, continuing your education, continuing to enhance your skills, whether that's for, you know, personal development or professional development or both.

00:03:34 Speaker_01
And one thing that we are so, so, so excited about, we've talked about it a lot, is this idea of hyper-personalizing education, where you're able to treat each individual as an individual and provide this personalized learning.

00:03:45 Speaker_01
So AI-powered learning is really exciting people. It's obviously exciting me and Ron. If you've listened to previous podcasts, you know we talk about this a lot. But AI, because not everybody learns the same way, right?

00:03:56 Speaker_01
Like even me and Ron, we're very different learners. And even me and my husband, we're very different learners.

00:04:01 Speaker_01
He's an incredibly visual learner, or he loves to read and really digest content that way, where sometimes I'm more of a visual learner in the sense that I recognize landmarks or different things, especially when we're driving, he always hates it, but I recognize things by landmarks.

00:04:19 Speaker_01
And so we just, you know, have different ways of learning. None are right or wrong. It's just how we are individuals, right? And so now with the help of AI, we're able to have these hyper-personalized experiences.

00:04:32 Speaker_01
So AI systems are really allowing us to learn individually. Maybe we can dig deeper into certain content if we're struggling with different areas, or it's able to, you know,

00:04:43 Speaker_01
share that content and display that content in different ways so that it really kind of fits your individual needs.

00:04:49 Speaker_01
And this personalized approach is helping students learn at their own pace, addressing their individual strengths, addressing their weaknesses, and maybe focusing more on that. And going along with that, we've also seen intelligent tutoring.

00:05:01 Speaker_01
systems, where AI-driven tutoring is really offering these personalized assistance, guiding students through different subjects, maybe especially subjects where students struggle, such as the STEM, you know, science, technology, math, and that these systems adapt to student responses in real time, maybe providing hints, explanations, or feedback, and it's really moving along with that learner.

00:05:26 Speaker_02
Yeah. I think this is why we're so excited about it is because the purpose of learning, the purpose of going to school, the purpose of education is to learn.

00:05:34 Speaker_02
And sort of like the model that we have had is that you have a teacher and the teacher uses some curriculum and the curriculum has been approved, sometimes actually in a very political process. There's a whole other story about that.

00:05:46 Speaker_02
And then that material is communicated by the teacher and the students are supposed to be in rapt attention listening to the teacher. The reason why we laugh is because that doesn't happen, right? The kids are not paying attention.

00:06:00 Speaker_02
The teachers may not be communicating the best way. The material may not be easy to communicate. As Kathleen mentioned, some people may be auditory, some people may be visually, some people may be written learning.

00:06:10 Speaker_02
Whatever it is, some people are experiential. They like to learn through experience. All these different forms and Right now, the way education is, is a little bit of a one-size-fits-all.

00:06:20 Speaker_02
And what they do is they try to put you into buckets or categories. That's the non-hyper-personalized way of doing it, where some people are advanced, so they go into an advanced class. Some people are not advanced, so they go to a less advanced class.

00:06:31 Speaker_02
Some people want to dig deeper, so they take a specialized class. Whatever it is, that's how it's done. And then you get grades. and the grades are an indication of how well you've done. But I think we also know how grades work.

00:06:44 Speaker_02
Grades are highly subjective and that sometimes you get an A for something you don't deserve. Sometimes you get an F for something you don't deserve. Sometimes the grade doesn't even reflect whether you understand the material at all.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
So the reason why there's so much love for the idea of hyper-personalized learning is that you can truly

00:07:03 Speaker_02
communicate, you could truly get the student to try to actually understand the material and also verify their understanding in a way that's highly customized to that student.

00:07:14 Speaker_02
If they want to spend a lot of time on something that everybody else doesn't need any time on, that's great. If they want to spend time on things that just furthers their desire, why would you not want to do that?

00:07:24 Speaker_02
Why would you not want to let a student dig deeper into something that they have interest in? The teacher's like, well, we've already moved on to another subject or not digging deeper. would you want to stop that?

00:07:34 Speaker_02
So, there's a lot of really valid, good reasons to embrace AI in education, which is a way of saying there's a lot of fears of AI in education right now. People are afraid of cheating. People are afraid of short-cutting.

00:07:49 Speaker_02
People are afraid of people not learning, listening to lectures, recording the lectures, and then using AI tools to summarize them. And to all these things, we say hurrah, because

00:07:58 Speaker_02
you're really trying to optimize for the goals of learning, which is understanding of the material, and also deepening people's desires and interests in whatever it is they're trying to learn.

00:08:08 Speaker_02
Now, of course, some people mean that you may not be interested in English literature, you may not be interested in US history, you may not be interested in chemistry or physics, you may not be interested in any of those things, so you're not going to deepen your learning there.

00:08:20 Speaker_02
But you may get the learning that you need to to establish that minimum level of competency. So, that's part of why there's so much excitement there.

00:08:28 Speaker_02
Of course, we're seeing it also used in language learning because learning a language is one of those hard things. It's really complicated to, especially if you want to use it to actually speak, not just pass a test. It is really hard.

00:08:40 Speaker_02
So, there's a lot of ways in which we see AI improving overall learning. And I think the excitement about it is well-placed. And I hope that it really, truly comes to pass. And maybe the future of education will maybe look very different.

00:08:54 Speaker_02
Maybe it's everybody gets their little AI augmented assistant that you're working with. And then there's like some opportunities. School, if you will, is more of an opportunity for collaboration.

00:09:06 Speaker_02
And school is more of an opportunity for the soft skills, right? And we talk about creativity, collaboration, communication, creative.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
Critical thinking.

00:09:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, critical thinking and all the other aspects that maybe schools have not really taught very well in the past.

00:09:22 Speaker_01
Exactly, right? Because for a variety of different reasons, they need to focus on different subjects. Now maybe we can bring some of that back, which is incredibly exciting.

00:09:30 Speaker_01
Another area, general area that we've seen AI help is overall improvement in teaching and, you know, really being this augmented intelligence tool, which we love.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
I always love talking about augmented intelligence because it's a way to not replace the human, but help the human do their job better. And so some of these,

00:09:50 Speaker_01
these tools can be used to help alleviate some of those, you know, maybe manual tasks in the past. So what we've seen is that automated grading is becoming popular.

00:10:00 Speaker_01
And yes, of course, there was always, you know, like Scantrons or you can have multiple choice and things can, you know, the system can go and automatically grade that.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
In fact, our CPM AI methodology and certification is that way where, you know, we have these,

00:10:15 Speaker_01
Exams and well we have these exercises after all of the lessons just to make sure that you're understanding that and that's automatically graded but now with the help of AI we can have AI tools that assist teachers with automatically grading multiple choice tests but also now things that aren't multiple choice like essays or even complex assignments.

00:10:34 Speaker_01
And this can reduce the time that teachers spend on grading to allow them to focus more on student interaction, or it can also be used as an additional pass to make sure that we are seeing, you know, grading being fair across the board so that teachers aren't playing favorites, where Ron had mentioned earlier, maybe some people are getting an A and some people are getting an F, and it's very subjective.

00:10:54 Speaker_01
Maybe the teacher doesn't like your writing style, but it doesn't mean that you're a poor writer. So now we can use these tools to help create a more fair and even playing field for everybody. We've also seen virtual classrooms and online learning.

00:11:08 Speaker_01
So yes, this can go into, you know, K through 12, but also we think about how does this work for professional environments and how can we have this idea of this lifelong learner so that as a professional now,

00:11:22 Speaker_01
who's maybe in your 30s or 40s or 50s, 60s, you know, you want to be this lifelong learner.

00:11:27 Speaker_01
We've seen that AI is now enhancing these virtual learning environments by providing real-time translations, especially if we have people who, you know, maybe it's not, you know, English isn't your first language and the course is being taught in English.

00:11:41 Speaker_01
And we can also have adaptive learning paths and also personalized recommendations. So maybe there's a variety of different courses that you can do or, you know,

00:11:50 Speaker_01
in the curriculum, and now with the help of AI, it's able to provide you with that personalized path and personalized courses and recommendations that you wouldn't have had otherwise. So we're really seeing it in a variety of different ways.

00:12:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, and we could further enhance sort of the, you know, what teachers do is more than just, you know, take curriculum and communicate it and, you know, take the responses from the class and grade it, right?

00:12:15 Speaker_02
A lot of educational people are in charge of developing the curriculum, right? And so you can have AI systems that can go in there and take a look at all the data and figure out how to develop more effective curriculum.

00:12:27 Speaker_02
Of course, for public school education and things like that, it's more complicated because there needs to be lots of approvals.

00:12:32 Speaker_02
But as Kathleen mentioned, there's a lot of professional development, things that are not just K-12 or higher education, where you're trying to get people to understand maybe something for their industry or something for their profession or something they just need to know or they should know.

00:12:44 Speaker_02
And I have to say, a lot of professional development is not really done very well. A lot of stuff is just pre-recorded or recorded or even live webinars, and then we'll answer your questions in the chat.

00:12:56 Speaker_02
That doesn't really help if you learn something. There's a lot of room for AI here in developing more effective

00:13:03 Speaker_02
materials to, again, provide the benefit of what people want with education, is to actually learn those things, and of course also provide the support.

00:13:11 Speaker_02
Instead of having just a person there to answer the chats, or the interactions, or the emails, and maybe they're there at the beginning of the class, but they're not there at the end, and you may want this course to be sort of evergreen, especially if it's professional development.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
You may want this course to be available for years, you're not going to be answering chats two years from now.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
So having automated support and AI-enhanced support and mentorship that can answer questions about the course material, help with whatever issues there are with the class itself, maybe there are deadlines or homework requirements or milestones or things like that, and career guidance.

00:13:49 Speaker_02
I think that That's really helpful. I think, you know, that's what we really want from education is not from the learners perspective, but also from the instructors perspective to really optimize what this whole education experience is like.

00:14:03 Speaker_01
Exactly. And we've also just seen how it's improving education as a whole. So one, it's allowing for accessibility, right? I mean, not everybody has the means or the resources for tutoring, for example, or to get that extra

00:14:24 Speaker_01
for a variety of different reasons. Sometimes it's just actual resources aren't available. Sometimes it can be a financial thing. So now we've seen AI tools really help with all of that. Also accessibility from maybe a disability standpoint.

00:14:39 Speaker_01
So AI tools are allowing speech-to-text or text-to-speech software that can enhance that accessibility for students with disabilities.

00:14:47 Speaker_01
And maybe if you have a hearing impairment or a visual impairment, different types of learning disabilities, we're really seeing AI being used as a helpful tool.

00:14:58 Speaker_01
And I think that that's going to continue to grow in the years to come, which we're really excited about. And also the use of predictive analytics. So we're seeing AI being used to help predict students' performance.

00:15:08 Speaker_01
And then also being able, because we know that AI is able to look at vast amounts of data very quickly, and it can also look at past or current data to help predict future trends. So it can identify students that maybe are at risk of falling behind.

00:15:23 Speaker_01
and possibly identify it earlier than the humans would be able to spot this. So you don't need to get through most of the school year only to take some standardized test and go, holy moly, that kid didn't do so well.

00:15:34 Speaker_01
Maybe they're really struggling in certain areas that we didn't realize. Now we can see this and be able to predict it before it actually happens and do some intervention so that these students don't fall behind.

00:15:46 Speaker_01
And so we're seeing that different institutions and educational, institutions are using these platforms to analyze student data, helping educators intervene early, and then provide necessary support to ensure student success.

00:16:00 Speaker_01
Because really, at the end of the day, that's what we're looking for, right? We want everybody to enjoy education. We want everybody to keep learning and growing. And so, yes, that's focused kind of on that K through 12 side.

00:16:11 Speaker_01
But again, we talk about this idea of this lifelong learner. right, have this idea that you can continually learn and that you're never too old to learn new things and to try new things. And I think that that also helps with this as well.

00:16:24 Speaker_01
So, you know, we've seen it in that, you know, K through 12 setting, but also in that professional setting as well, how we can use AI to help with the overall education. And it's really exciting. We've talked about this in previous podcasts.

00:16:36 Speaker_01
I think this is going to be a topic we continue to talk about, this hyper-personalized education and how we can continue to grow and enhance. So we definitely want you to stay subscribed to AI Today. We have a lot more podcasts in our Use Case series.

00:16:49 Speaker_01
We also have some wonderful interviews lined up that I encourage you to check out. If you have used AI for education, or maybe your children have, or anybody in your network, please reach out and let us know.

00:17:02 Speaker_01
We always love to hear how our listeners are using AI on a daily basis. So engage with us on LinkedIn, engage with the posts that we create, and definitely keep commenting. Like this episode and want to hear more?

00:17:15 Speaker_01
With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:17:23 Speaker_01
Make sure to subscribe to AI Today if you haven't already on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, Amazon, or your favorite podcast platform. Want to dive deeper and get resources to drive your AI efforts further?

00:17:36 Speaker_01
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00:17:48 Speaker_01
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.