How AI Can Transform And Enhance Education

AI is revolutionizing the education landscape, offering personalized learning experiences and transforming traditional methodologies to enhance both teaching and learning effectiveness.

SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Artem Pochechuev, Head of Data Science at Cortlex – “How AI Can Transform And Enhance Education”

If we asked you to name three words that are associated with learning, what would you think about in the first turn? Let us guess. Books, teachers, and a blackboard? Or maybe pencils, pens, and a piece of chalk? Endless lessons, boring tests, and stressful exams? Of course, personal associations may vary but they all will be very close to each other. However, the most interesting thing here is that if you turn to your parent with this question, you will get practically the same answer. And even if you go to your grandparents and ask them to join this experiment, you will get very similar results. The issue is that for many years the education industry has been based on the same principles, rules, approaches, and notions. That’s quite sad.

But we’d like to demonstrate that modern technologies in general (and AI in particular) have the power to change the game. We are talking not just about replacing paper books with PDF versions (quite often it is already done). We are talking about deeper changes, about enhancing the quality of education and the efficiency of studies. In this context, it even doesn’t matter whether we take school education or lifelong learning as an example.

AI can address the existing issues in education. And that’s the idea that we are going to prove in this article.

Old problems – modern solutions

When somebody mentions the use of AI in education, the majority of people start thinking about large language model-based chatbots like the well-known ChatGPT that can write essays instead of students. Of course, in this case, the benefits of Artificial Intelligence for developing students’ creativity and their skills in expressing their thoughts are rather doubtful. Nevertheless, despite all the amazing capacities that AI in general (and ChatGPT in particular) has, experienced teachers can always easily recognize those texts that were generated by a language model and then just copied and pasted by a student. That’s why there is nothing to get worried about.

However, let’s change our perspective. We do not offer you to “kill” education with AI. Vice versa, our experts want to improve it and make it a more enjoyable journey for all participants of this process, including teachers, students, and even parents, if you deal with school programs.

Why not use the generative functionality for creating unique tests, quizzes, and questionnaires? When teachers prepare tests, they try to provide at least 2-3 variants to restrict the possibilities for cheating. If somebody decides to create 20 variants of tests, one for each student, it may take too long. Nevertheless, AI can become an amazing helper here. Just in a couple of minutes, a teacher can get as many variants of tests as it is required.

AI-powered tools can be also of great use not only for encouraging students to rely only on their own knowledge (instead of their classmates’ talents) during tests. Teachers can leverage the capacities of Artificial Intelligence for creating lesson plans, lists of questions for discussion after reading tests, and various engaging activities.

Want to better understand how it works? Open ChatGPT and ask it to offer you 10 questions on the topic “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Wow, just imagine how much time can be saved!

AI tools for self-education

If you have already decided that such chatbots are a good solution only for teachers at schools, it is not so. They can be extremely helpful for students as well, including those who need to get prepared for a test and those who are trying to learn various things on their own. When you have only one source of information and the materials seem to be unclear to you, that’s a problem. But when you have an AI-powered chatbot at hand, you can ask it to offer various explanations of the same topic. If the offered explanation is still rather confusing, it can generate the 2nd, the 3rd, and even the 10th version. It’s highly likely that one of the offered variants will be a perfect option for you.

Artificial Intelligence can be applied not only when you want it to create something for you. It can also help you enhance what you have already created on your own. Grammarly is an outstanding example of a writing assistant that can check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and style and provide suggestions on how to improve your text. The products offered by Grammarly rely on patterns, rules, and the combination of AI techniques like deep learning, natural language processing, and machine learning. It means that Grammarly is continuously evolving and becoming “smarter”. And the results that it can demonstrate today are much better than those that we could see a couple of years ago. Now it can understand context more deeply and offer more human-like structures and word combinations for your texts.

The capabilities of understanding context and continuously learning new cases are also very important for online translators. If you used Google Translate, for example, 5-7 years ago and you use it these days, you definitely know what we are talking about. The quality of texts is significantly better. Modern solutions of this kind can easily detect the language of the original text, even when a user has no idea of what it can be. But what is even more important today is that there are next-gen tools, like DeepL. They can not only translate texts that you copy from your files and paste in the relevant field but also can work with files in different formats, like DOCX, PDF, or PPTX. This feature can greatly streamline the process of translating educational materials.

Cutting-edge tools for educational institutions

Another use case of AI-powered solutions is the organization of the learning process and management of tasks. Platforms like Notion are intended exactly for such goals. Users can rely on them to take notes during classes, create to-do lists, work on different projects together with their groupmates, etc. You may ask us how AI powers such solutions. And it will be a very good question as similar platforms do not always have any AI functionality. Nevertheless, Artificial Intelligence can expand their capacities. For example, it can help to make your notes shorter or longer (by generating additional content on the given topic), prepare summaries for you, change the voice and tone of your text, provide explanations of different terms that stay unclear during classes, etc.

We believe that for educational institutions, it can become a wonderful initiative to implement AI-powered Learning management systems (LMS). Such solutions will enable automation of multiple processes. Among the features that can be included, it’s worth mentioning tracking student progress, managing grades, conducting real-time assessments, and automating administrative tasks. But the high personalization of the learning path can become even more valuable for learners and teachers.

Personalized learning experience

One of the hugest problems of education systems in many countries is the use of “one-size-fits-all” solutions. We should admit that we all are different, we have different skills and talents. We may require different periods of time for understanding and memorizing the same things. While for one student it will be enough just to have a look at a new grammar rule and then train it on 1 or 2 exercises, another person may need to read an explanation a couple of times and further devote at least a couple of hours to practicing. And that’s completely okay. Teachers in classrooms just do not have any possibility to introduce this individual approach to each student. But AI-powered platforms can improve the situation. They can continuously gather data related to students’ skills, talents, interests, progress, and results to build highly personalized programs that will help to increase the quality of learning.

These individualized plans will be formed in such a way that learning will be comfortable for students with any level of skills and background knowledge. AI is able to automatically analyze the complexity of all the added content, its type, covered topics, and style, and categorize it based on these parameters. It can work with documents written in several languages and automatically detect the language that was used for creating each piece of your text. Thanks to these features teachers can avoid a lot of routine work and concentrate more on those tasks where their involvement is really needed.

Users of platforms for self-education can also greatly benefit from AI and again such features as personalized recommendations and learning plans, real-time evaluation of knowledge, grammar checkers, and others can greatly improve learning experiences.

Final word

The main goal of introducing AI-powered solutions is not to break down the traditional education system or replace people with robots. Vice versa, the main goal is to help people, to increase the effectiveness of all their learning (or teaching) efforts, and to make education a pleasant journey for everyone, regardless of their skills and capacities.

AI-powered tools for learning typically have an amazingly wide audience. They can enhance the learning process, and make it more straightforward, personalized, and interesting to everyone.

That’s true even in those cases when people do not experience any learning difficulties. When we are talking about people who face them the role of AI is even more significant. One of the most widely spread issues that can be mentioned in this context is dyslexia which affects writing and reading skills while it has no impact on all other cognitive abilities. Artificial Intelligence can help people get over all the difficulties caused by dyslexia and continue learning at a normal pace. At Cortlex, we have already delivered a solution that can change the lives of thousands of people. Sounds interesting? That’s a topic for our next article that we are going to share quite soon. Stay tuned!

About the Author:

In his current position, Artem Pochechuev leads a team of talented engineers. Oversees the development and implementation of data-driven solutions for Cortlex’s customers. He is passionate about using the latest technologies and techniques in data science to deliver innovative solutions that drive business value. Outside of work, Artem enjoys cooking, ice-skating, playing piano, and spending time with his family.