Introduction
AI is making its way into almost every sector of the economy. A sector that is involved in this AI revolution that will have the biggest impact today and into the future, I feel, is education. AI in education. There are multiple benefits and drawbacks of this. That is what Sanjay Adhikesaven wrote about in an article(the article can be found here).
Summary of Article
The article has two main parts: how AI is being used in the current educational process and the concerns of AI in this sector. The article first touches on how AI is being used in education currently. AI – as the article states – is being used in the educational process today for personalized learning for students. It can also give insights to the students as to where they are struggling and where they need to practice more. Another major way that AI is being used currently in education is through the use of NLP for chatbots to answer questions for students so that teachers don’t have to work outside of school hours and students can still learn outside of school hours. Next, the article says that AI can be used for security purposes through computer vision. Computer vision that is tied to the security cameras can scan for unwanted things inside the school. Also, computer vision can help teachers in other ways such as grading tests, grading essays, using facial recognition to take attendance and exam proctoring. One last way in which AI is being used in schools is that it is being used to create subtitles to lectures in real time to help children who are just learning English comprehend the lecture better. This is where the article switches to the concerns of AI in the education sector. Some of the main concerns regarding AI in general are present here as well: data privacy, training data bias, and lack of self-correction. However, there are some new concerns that are specific to the education sector, with the major one being – according to the article – expanded inequity between wealthier and more underprivileged schools. Since some schools are able to afford AI and others aren’t this could expand the knowledge gap and the learning ability between schools.
My Take
Overall, the article was a good one. It was very thorough and very easy to understand. The article also gave me some new perspectives to look at AI from in this sector. It sparked some new ideas in my mind of some ways that AI could be used. For example, I didn’t know that schools were using computer vision to take attendance. I feel that would really help teachers and take a small task off of their backs every day. One more thing in the article that was a new concept to me and that I hadn’t thought of before is the fact that different schools might not be able to obtain this technology because of the socioeconomic status of the area they are in. I would suggest that to assess this problem instead of leaving it up to the schools to source their own AI software and hardware and to pay for it themselves, the government should develop it and allow the schools to use it if they want to, so that way all schools, regardless of socioeconomic status of the area that they are in, can get access to this technology. In the article I really liked the image at the beginning, it made for a fun, visual opening to the article.
Conclusion
All in all, this article was a good one. It was fun, and fascinating, made me think, and introduced me to new concepts. I highly recommend you read this article when you get the chance(the article can be found here).