Education is foundational for the growth and advancement of human society. Effective education lies in engaging individual learners in the learning process. As aptly put in the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” Engaging students nowadays is facing a few challenges listed below:
Educators at all levels of education (i.e., primary, high schools, higher education) have been overworked (check the recent news in Forbes, Fortune, GlobalNews). Education Support, a nonprofit advocate organization for educators in the United Kingdom, has been tracking teacher wellbeing index since 2017. Their 2023 survey of over 3,004 education staff indicates that 78% of teachers are stressed, a 6% increase from 2022, the highest of all job roles. In the United States, the Gallup Panel Workforce Study conducted in 2022 shows that educators at all levels have the highest level of burnout rates. Similar findings have been reported in other countries. Student engagement suffers as the result of the increasing level of educator overworking. The situation could not be easily remedied due to financial constraints faced by educational institutions.
Students have been found to lose attention in class due to increase in class size and digital distractions (social media). The content delivered usually appeals to the middle level. Students who are at the advanced level or lagging behind can quickly lose interest.
The one-size-fit-all design is not flexible enough to tailor to students’ knowledge level and personal interests.
While advanced information technologies have facilitated content delivery and course management, AI could disrupt education by deepening student involvement in learning. A recent book entitled Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s A Good Thing) by Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy) is full of exciting examples of using AI to transform education. Bill Gates praises the book as a “timely master class for anyone interested in the future of learning in the AI era.”
In the book, Khan illustrated how Khanmigo, an AI-powered personalized tutor, could be used to transform learning and education. For example, Khanmigo could take on the persona of George Washington, the first President of the United States, to answer students’ questions about himself and events in his time. Khanmigo could emulate Rembrandt van Rijn, a famous Dutch artist, to talk about arts, or take on the role of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to explain the context for its development. What is fascinating is that learning takes place in a form of conversation, a Socratic dialogue, where both Khanmigo and the student could ask each other questions.
While educators are hesitant to adopt AI tools such as GenAI due to serious concerns with academic integrity, Khan pointed out that educators should utilize AI to their advantage and demonstrated how the use of AI could promote (rather than diminish) learning while deterring cheating. For example, educators could ask students to critique AI-generated content. Khanmigo is used to assist students in assignment completion. And educators could decide the extent of support (e.g., suggesting ideas, correcting grammars, improving content organization) that AI could provide in an assignment.
Note that through the Socratic dialogue and personal tutoring, AI is already providing personalized learning. But the future of learning could get even better: AI could grade papers with immediate and detailed feedback; AI-powered virtual reality will bring education close to the Star Trek universe; with AI, learning doesn’t need to end in the classroom, but rather flows across different contexts.
No doubt that AI-powered applications such as Khanmigo will challenge the current way of education being provided and associated IT infrastructure, as analyzed in the recent Gartner report on strategic roadmap for student information systems. However, as eloquently put by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate and a famous philosopher, “you can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” With the current deep-trenched challenges in engaging students in learning, a bit of educated bravery is needed to take our education to the next level.