AI, no matter you like it or not, is a major technology in our daily lives, e.g. face recognition, autonomous driving, and robotics. How about the impact of AI on student learning? There are two important aspects we need to focus on: (i) educate students and our young generations how to effectively use AI in their learning; (ii) how to use AI to assists educators (teachers, instructors) to facilitate their teaching.
For (i), we hope our students and new generations understand what AI can help them. For examples, AI tutors, ChatGPT-like systems to help them draft a report, correct the grammars, reorganize the structure of an article, and even write computer codes for them. On the other hand, a lot of criticism on using AI to help students learn such as students may not know how to write reports and do analysis on data. However, I have a different view. Depending on how we educate students, AI can effectively produce a draft, however, whether this draft is good and whether the students can learn from this draft and further improve it, this is the job of our educators. We should not resist the new generation to use new technology, but how to guide them to learn using this new technology is a major issue. Plus there is an important issue on ethics. How to teach our students and new generations using new technology in an ethical manner (like the recent news of using deepfake to create fake sexual pictures for classmates) is also an important topic we, educators, need to pay attention to.
For (ii), there have been tremendous improvement on using AI to help teachers and educators to teach. Let me name a few examples. (a) automatic grading of answers: it took a lot of resources for teachers to grade and follow the logics of mathematical questions, to grade and understand articles written by students, and to follow reports from scientific experiments in physics, chemistry, and biology, also for course works related to social science and public affairs. The advancement in AI now allows us to do automatic grading on all the above in a relatively easier way. Of course, we still need our professional educators to safe-guide the outcome from AI grading as no AI systems are 100% perfect. Another good points of using AI in education is that data analysis can be done automatically and more personalized. AI systems can be used to identify the weakness of students in every subject and can also automatically provide more help and generate questions to strengthen the students to overcome their weaknesses.
Overall speaking, personally, I think that we need to leverage the power of AI in education. On the other hand, we need to guide the students how to use AI effectively and ethically to fully utilize the technology while enhancing the learning and teaching experience of both students and teachers.
