Artificial intelligence (AI) in education is not new. The pioneers of AI during the 1950s were cognitive scientists who were directly involved in education research (Doroudi, 2023). However, there needs to be closer inspection on the vast potential of AI on the impact of the future of education. This blog post briefly explores the emergence of AI in education and its implications for the future of education.
AI in education has been identified as a key tool to increase educational efficiency due to the demand from nations to cater for the expanding economy (Kopp & Thomsen, 2023). To illustrate, Oak National Academy in England is set to receive an additional £2 million from the UK government to develop a personalised AI-enabled lesson-planning assistant to reduce the workload of teachers (Martin, 2023). Major tech corporations operating in the domain of education continue to refashion their products and services by including elements of AI. For example, Google For Education is introducing a set of AI-powered tools, such as AI-generated questions and learning analytics, to enhance the teaching and learning process. While Khan Academy, a popular American non-profit educational organisation, launched Khanmigo, with the tagline ‘world class AI for education’, a chatbot that acts a ‘supertutor’ by allowing students to chat with AI-driven history figures (such as Einstein) and literary characters (like Hamlet). This uptake of AI in education draws attention to a quote by Andreas Schleicher, the Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who said:
‘The bottom line is, if we want to stay ahead of technological developments, we have to find and refine the qualities that are unique to our humanity, and that complement, not compete with, capacities we have created in our computers, schools need to develop first-class humans, not second-class robots’ (quoted in Watson 2021).
