Thoughts on the future of AIED…timestamped 4/30/24 1:48pm bc I will probably have another opinion tomorrow…

I saw a video recently of a teacher being interviewed. She was meant to give a glowing review of a new AI powered adaptive learning program deployed by the university to which she teaches. Her gaze hollowed as she said, “I guess I have become less of a teacher, and more of a custodian of learning.” This was meant to be positive but you could tell, in her tone and heart, it did not feel that way.

This technology relegated her to a checker of completion statuses. She was taken out of the learning part of the equation. How can the craft of teaching improve if we don’t do it anymore? When I think of the stark difference between my second grade class and my daughter’s, I am so glad she is getting to learn in a more productive and inclusive way. And, I hope that her child’s experience is even better. 

So, what is my point? I worry about the art of teaching and learning when we rely too heavily on algorithms designed more with efficecies in mind than in the why for teaching. I left a corporate career to become a teacher. I enrolled back into school, racked up tens of thousands of dollars of debt, studied Vygotsky and Piaget, not because I wanted to be a more well read teacher but because I wanted to be a GOOD teacher. I learned about how to use learning analytics to pinpoint my students’ needs. Being more efficient about mastering the necessary rote skills, meant we had more time for critical thinking quests. We threw eggs out of second story classroom and had heated discussion why some cracked and others didn’t. I attribute this time and space for extensions in learning to my ability to intricately pinpoint their needs through the analysis of their data paired with the human connection I had with each student. 

I believe artificial intelligence for education will give us the space for dimensions of thought, art, and learning we haven’t even dreamed up yet.  Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Educational Data Mining/Leanring Analytics, Adaptive Learning Systems, AI-Driven Game-Based Learning, Natural Language Processing for learning, Virtual and Augmented Reality for learning, AI for accessibility, Predictive Analytics and the list could go on and on- this is exciting for learning. As a mom, as a teacher, and as a human who fundamentally believes that education is a modern day human right, I believe that each of these technologies can bring about growth, perhaps exponentially. But, I also believe we have to move forward cautiously with an intention of understanding the risks for feeding our data to systems to which we don’t hold the reins. Hold on to the art of teaching. Include the voices of teachers and students into the technologies we design. And, if we do this, we can fulfill the hope for technology in education set forth in 1926, “Lift from [the teacher's] shoulders as much as possible of this burden and make her [sic] free for those inspirational and thought-stimulating activities which are, presumably, the real function of the teacher.” Pressey, S.L. (1926)