AI in Education

      It’s no secret that AI is the next technological wave we’ll all be riding. I’m personally convinced it will be just as transformative to our daily lives as the advent of the internet was 25-30 years ago. Of course, it will be impactful to education as well so let’s take a look at what it can mean to high school students.

Indeed, there are benefits. It’s no secret that individualizing education can be crucial to a student’s success. This task takes time and resources from teachers though. Al has the potential to examine a student’s problems and provide immediate feedback to students and create lessons that are tailored to a student’s specific needs. This can have a powerful impact on a student’s growth. Further, it can enrich a student’s education by providing more in-depth instruction in areas that appeal to individual students or to students who may be working ahead of their peers. Teachers who are saddled with hundreds of students or the “canned” curriculums of other educational programs can struggle with these things. It’s hard to blame them as previous educational efforts had to be able to deliver to the masses. AI has the potential to save much of the time it would otherwise take to make these educational adaptations. 

Regardless, there are some potential drawbacks to AI in education. These include privacy concerns, algorithm biases, reduced human interaction, and the potential for inaccurate information. AI is still in its infancy, and I don’t think we’re at a point yet where we can take whatever AI tells us to the bank. That brings us to what most people might see as the biggest AI concern, and that is academic integrity. 

Schools are already battling students who use AI to cheat. Why take the time to write an essay or solve a math problem when you can have AI do it for you? Schools are taking measures to combat these things (sometimes with the help of AI, ironically), but it’s one more thing to guard against that didn’t used to be there. Again, I think AI is destined to be a mainstay of our lives going forward, but I think it’s important for students to still learn how to do things the old-fashioned way. We’re a long way away from AI being able to do everything for us and if students don’t take the time to learn how to do things without AI, they’re not really learning. I’m afraid this could result in a population that has difficulties discerning what is accurate and what is not–what is real and what is not and that could have just as many negative implications for our future as not knowing how to do stuff to begin with.

So, AI is here to stay, and it will be influential in education. Schools have the potential to harness it for good and should work to teach students how to do that. Students, on the other hand, will be better off if they don’t allow themselves to become overly reliant on this new tool.