GAPS AND BARRIERS PERSIST EVEN AS CHANGE ACCELERATES
Despite the many educational advancements from the 1900s to the present, there remain gaps in the education landscape. Some individuals and groups don’t have access to education and are therefore being left behind. Others struggle to navigate an increasingly complex world that demands people acquire new skills and knowledge to succeed at earning a living and building a career.
According to the World Economic Forum, global literacy rates have been on the rise for a century and a half, hitting 87 percent in 2022, a new high, but that statistic is not uniform across the globe. As you likely suspect, there are significant differences between certain countries and subpopulations. For example, in countries where conflict and war have disrupted daily life (including access to education) for years, literacy rates are much lower. In Afghanistan, the literacy rate is only 37 percent. In South Sudan the rate is 35 percent. And in Mali, literacy was at 31 percent in 2020, down from 35 percent in 2018.
Lower literacy rates often affect some groups of people more than others. Specifically, women are often more likely to be left behind. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the literacy rate for males was 72 percent in 2022 but only 59 percent for females.
In 2018 the World Economic Forum also reported that “more than one-half of India’s workforce will need to be re-skilled by 2022 to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” That’s a huge portion of the population. As industries shift and evolve in the face of political winds, climate change, and advancing technology, many people around the world will need to re-skill to remain employable.
Here in the United States, post-secondary education is ever more out of reach for many as a result of increasing costs and competing priorities (like earning enough to keep pace with inflation). Low unemployment rates tempt people to enter the job market when they might otherwise pursue education. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but in the long run, those who forego education may be sacrificing future earnings and opportunities.
Of those students who do start a college education, approximately 17 percent don’t return for a second year. Again, that number is not uniform across interest groups. Black and Native American populations leave at higher rates than other groups, at 24.7 percent and 37.3 percent respectively.
These are just some of the challenges facing learners. On the other side of the coin, educational institutions are challenged to recruit, retain, support, and graduate students in an increasingly competitive environment. The pace of change is so fast that an incoming first-year undergraduate student may face a very different employment landscape four years later. How can students and institutions prepare under such circumstances?
AI and ML have some answers.
AUTOMATED TUTORING AND SELF-PACED INSTRUCTION
AI can provide tutoring guidance to students as well, thus supporting their learning directly.
One researcher in this area is Vincent Aleven at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, whose projects include a study of AI-powered tutoring for middle school students. His team of researchers “wants to understand if data-optimized AI-based tutoring software, smartphones and social motivation can work together to enhance learning.”
As that quote indicates, there’s often more to designing a successful AI application than the algorithm alone. In this case, the researchers’ interest in smartphones and the particular social motivations of their population (teens and preteens) are equally important.
By 2030, half of the world’s youth will live in countries with mobile-first or mobile-only Internet connections. Smartphones and mobile devices have the potential to reduce the cost of educational equipment, alleviate pressures on Internet access, and expand access to educational opportunities in ways that are affordable and accessible.
Moreover, several experimental studies point to a strong relationship between mobile technologies and learning. For example, York and Loeb showed that in the United States, low-income parents who received three weekly text messages about their children’s academic skills increased their own involvement in their child’s learning. These texts also helped to increase their children’s gains in early literacy. Angrist and colleagues conducted a field experiment in Botswana to examine the effectiveness of mobile intervention for students’ learning during the early lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were randomly assigned to three groups: one group received SMS texts with weekly numerical problems and fifteen- to twenty-minute live phone-call walk-throughs of the problems. The second group received only the SMS texts, and the third group did not receive anything. They found that the group with SMS texts plus phone calls experienced a 24 percent gain on performance scores, whereas the SMS-only group experienced a 13 percent level gain on performance scores.
To date, the research on the relationship between mobile technologies and learner outcomes is still thin. Whereas smartphones can bring tremendous potential to educational settings, particularly for disadvantaged groups crossing the digital divide, they also introduce opportunities for misuse and situations inducive of distraction, both of which, of course, degrade learning outcomes.
PERSONALIZED LEARNING JOURNEYS
Another advantage of data-driven AI is the opportunity to personalize content and experiences for each individual. Personalization is already ubiquitous in the technology we use to shop (think Amazon, Google, Meta, and other recommendation-driven engines), choose our entertainment (Netflix, Spotify, Pandora), decide where to go and what to do (location-based recommendations), and more. In the future, personalized learning will be just as common.
The country of Estonia is already heading there. Its government supports various projects designed “to implement AI-driven solutions to personalize students’ learning paths.” Most traditional educational systems and institutions have grouped students mainly by age and provided roughly the same instruction to all students in a given group. Resource constraints— namely teachers’ time and energy—kept personalization at a minimum in most cases.
In Estonia, the government “has started building a personalized learning path infrastructure” using data and AI. The effort includes multiple projects incorporating AI and machine learning in diagnostic testing, customization of materials, and self-paced learning. As Education Estonia reports: “What is great for one student, may not be good for another. What improves the progress of an ‘average student,’ may hold back top performers.”
Personalized, computer-assisted learning can further help students in places where qualified teachers aren’t always available, such as in developing countries and more remote communities. A study of middle school students in India showed that students who received personalized homework achieved better exam scores (4.16 percent higher) compared to students who did not get personalized homework. Combined with the spread of mobile technology and supportive policies (such as those adopted by Estonia), computer-assisted learning can be used to deliver education to entire populations efficiently and effectively.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
Applications of artificial intelligence in education are plentiful. AI helps schools reduce instances of cheating (especially online). It helps institutions run more efficient facilities and campuses. There’s more: AI can enhance accessibility for learners with different needs, teach preschoolers basic aca- demic skills through interactive games, and help administrators optimize schedules and lesson plans.
AI brings much more to education than a bot that’s good at writing passable (if mediocre) text filled with “accurately simulated natural-language sentences.” The reality of AI is much wider and more diverse, and it’s evolving rapidly. Just as the personal computer changed much of our educational systems, AI is positioned to usher in a new normal that we are only beginning to glimpse.
Check out the book here: Thrive: Maximizing Well-Being in the Age of AI .
