What Teachers Need to Know About AI?

“It is mesmerizing” said one of them. “It is ultimate,” said another. “A teacher would become a magician with this tool” said another as she was passing by. These were the comments I heard from some of the teachers who returned after attending a few workshops on Artificial intelligence. These comments are natural and are outcomes of the human tendency to eulogise something which gravitates them, which triggers their fancy, which they think that takes them to the zenith of their intellectual peaks. The reality could be different.

“What will happen to teachers? Will they be needed anymore in schools?” was a serious doubt a young eduprenurs had. “In the next few years, the shape and the design of the schools will be changing” observed the weather forecaster. “New type of home schools will emerge with parents participating and playing a facilitative role” an AI investor observed.

The electronic media and the Newspapers are afloat with the information of limitless funding into the domain of AI predicting the economic and business persons planning to book their profits in advance before the egg could be hatched. The share markets are closely watching with interest the fight between the bull and the bear.

Are we entering a new generational thinking? Are we becoming victims of new lifestyles? Are our mindscapes about human competencies seeking new horizons?

With views and opinions engulfing the clouds in which AI operates, it is necessary for the teachers to understand some basics before they whole-heartedly celebrate AI.

The ability of AI to work on its previous knowledge and data inputs is limitless and unparalleled. It can help to seek, restore, and add value to one’s existing knowledge. But any idea that AI generates new knowledge may be a misunderstanding. It is more a perception of new knowledge than the new knowledge itself. The outputs of AI being based on the existing data inputs, it is important to ensure its credibility, validity, and authenticity.

Both for the teachers and students the AI is a boon to handle the routine tasks with immense flexibility and diversity. It can provide insights into newer perceptions to the existing data. It can also provide many opportunities for personalized learning depending on the specific learning needs of the learners. Its ability to understand learning preference, learning dynamics and the learning pathways of the learners is quite impressive. But one needs to understand that it depends only logic and not on the emotional profile of the learners that drives their learning. The role of teachers in the emotional connect to the learners can never be totally or adequately compensated by this tool.

AI tables all the required information to any learning need to the learner. Beyond this facilitation, the role of AI in invoking the curiosity and learning need is limited. The virtual tutors of AI can help in providing instant feedback and thereby help in fixing learning gaps for early compensatory learning but suffers from its inability to provide empathy to the learner in one’s learning task.

As a tool, it can be accessed by any learner. But the enormous variance in each of the tools by different agencies, do provide differing pathways and is liable to create differing perceptions to the same task in the absence of any mediation to learning process. With equal opportunities for learning, there is no access, opportunity, and gateways to pursue excellence. The intervention of the teachers in encouraging and empowering excellence would be essential.

Learning is purely a learner’s choice. Though AI can trigger imagination, fancy, innovation, lateral thinking, synergetic thinking and help the learner to gain entry to the Mida’s world, the adage that ‘A bad worker blames his tools’ is also true to the world of AI. With cut-throat competitions emerging worldwide in harnessing the power of AI, mere knowledge of AI alone may not help. It would depend on the effective use of the power of AI. Further, its contextual application is important rather than open-ended efforts.

Emerging evidence have shown that the interactivity of AI with the learner does provoke curiosity and opens the horizon of learning to divergent as well as convergent points in learning. But several cases have also been reported where the unmonitored use of it has led to not only learning challenges, demotivation of the self apart from ethical issues. However, with no iron curtains available, it appears that the industry must do a lot of work to address these emerging concerns.

AI provides enormous opportunities to teachers to provide customized or tailor-made learning inputs to the learners based on their minute-to-minute feedback online, but their assessment of the learner must be more open-ended, broad-based, and non-judgmental. As AI provides adequate opportunities to the learner to integrate extended, non-formal learning to emerge as a non-linear learner, teachers need to focus more on the process of learning than the output of learning.

Teachers need to ensure that they do not use AI as a tool for mere gamification, promotion of fanciful ideas or thoughts or other incidental uses to stay popular in the classrooms. AI could facilitate in extended learning, research, projects and for furthering both cognitive and applied skills. Teachers must make their right choices to help learners use AI as a friend for purposeful and joyful learning.

The words of Elon Musk that “AI is likely to either be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity “ or that of Stephen Hawking that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” are not to be neglected. While I am not pessimistic about AI in classrooms, it is important to note that the human intelligence does not become subservient to AI.