Education or Artificial Intelligence?
When corporates can learn about their customers through AI, what stops us from bringing this intelligent way of learning to our classrooms?
Artificial Intelligence (AI)—the word does sound scary but it isn’t about sci-fi from Hollywood. In fact, those intruding advertisements on your Facebook showing you things that you searched for online sometime back, are powered by AI.
So much so that there are many worried that AI powered robots are going to take away their jobs. They probably will at some time. However, there will certainly remain some jobs that need a human touch. Can you imagine a robot for a mother or a teacher for that matter?
Interestingly, AI is already being used to analyse student data, test scores, IQ levels and to customize curriculums accordingly. When corporates can learn about their customers through AI, what stops us from bringing this intelligent way of learning to our classrooms?
You need to imagine this now. A teacher speaking to a wall or into a camera that is being broadcasted live to 50 students across 8 countries and the teacher knows exactly at any given point of time, who is attentive and who isn’t! Not just that, while the teacher is away, you can actually talk to a bot who ‘knows-it-all’. And, once the class is over, the students can go watch a movie together—how? Online on Netflix! If a classroom can be online, so can the movie.
“Education is about embracing the change. And this is a positive change. Imagine education reaching out to remote areas. We at XLRI have already embraced this and our professors teach such complex topics with great ease to students across the globe. We are getting positive feedback and in fact, it does make education affordable in the longer run. Let us not shy away from such innovative approaches,” said Fr. E Abraham, the dean, XLRI Jamshedpur, one of the first educational institutions in India to embrace AI-powered executive courses.
That is an intriguing point indeed. The demand for cheap education is on the rise. If instead of compromising on quality, educational institutions can resort to innovative methods of teaching, it could be a win-win situation for all.
The idea is disruption enough though. While e-learning is a growing industry, e-classrooms are still not that easily accepted. There are centres in Tamil Nadu that remotely handle atleast a 100 Intensive Care Patients in the US. If this can be a reality, so can bots teaching students be.
Talking to YourStory, Aditya Malik, CEO & MD of Talentedge, a company that assists educational institutions in AI-powered education, said “Machine learning is the definitive future of education in India. It is with this forethought that we launched SLIQ 2.0 for the benefit of our learners and mentors alike. We hope SLIQ 2.0 will enable truly customized-education and real-time problem solving capabilities. It will not only help learn faster but also foster user’s overall learning satisfaction. We are excited about this path-breaking platform and hope to garner a positive response from our users”.
For now, it is the executive courses that are witnessing interest as well as a surge in the number of applications for such bot-inspired learning, we might soon see this model being replicated in other regular classrooms as well.
As far as robots replacing mothers is concerned, let’s leave that to sci-fi for now!
