The rapid development of machine learning and artificial intelligence has affected numerous industries.
As far as education is concerned, AI can bring many positive changes to the classroom, helping learners and educators keep pace with the digital age. On the flip side, any technology can be used with malicious intent. Take a look at the top five use cases of AI in education, both positive and, well, not so much.
1. Assessment Facilitation
Academic assessment is a long, demanding, and labor-consuming process that takes up the lion's share of the time of educators all over the world. Teachers spend long hours reading student essays, checking homework, grading exams, and providing feedback. These activities are pretty stressful for educators, much like tests, term papers, and exams are for learners. Plagiarism search tools help teachers to some extent, but they still need more advanced technology to cope with the growing workload.
Artificial intelligence can facilitate student assessment and cut its duration. For instance, there are AI solutions for grading standardized tests, like Versant and Pearson. Another example of AI in assessment is IntelliMetric®, a new AI solution that can grade papers and provide immediate adaptive feedback to their authors. It helps teachers save time and motivates students to work on their tasks better. Aside from grading, teachers use AI to prepare personalized learning plans for learners who are not on the same page with the rest of the class.
2. Matching Students and Colleges
AI can help prospective students make the right choice when applying to a university or a college. It can also aid educational establishments in picking the most suitable applicants who should be enrolled in the institution. Admission officers of top schools are overwhelmed when it comes to selecting the right candidates. Finally, it’s up to the student to decide whether to enroll in the school or not, and their decision is usually subjective.
ConnecPath is an example if an AI-powered platform that can help students choose between schools. On this platform, a chatbot answers common career-related questions college applicants may have. If there is no response, the question goes to the forum, where experienced mentors answer it.
3. Personalized Learning
The traditional one-size-fits-all educational approach does not make sense in the modern world anymore. In the times of customization and personalization of every possible experience, it’s not only logical but also necessary for education to be tailored to the needs and capabilities of students. AI can support students by studying their learning history and suggesting learning patterns they’re most likely to respond to well. With the right data, it can create a complete learner profile to personalize the learning material to a given student.
Hubert.ai is an AI-powered personalized learning solution that intends to help educators better understand their students and respond to the individual needs of every given student effectively.
4. AI Brings New Forms of Cheating
Some students expect stellar academic results while putting less than stellar effort into their studying. Text modifications and essay mills are used to generate papers with minimal input from the students. With the expansion of AI, some students are likely to use this technology for cheating as well.
In the words of Dr. Susan Nash, Ph.D., Director of Education and Prof Dev at AAPG, “AI will write basic descriptive essays. They will be the ultimate patchwork quilt of snippets, at least at first. Later, though, as the AI algorithm improves, it will paraphrase and use different connectors, and so will be an original work. Plagiarism detection apps will need to become quite wily to detect AI-generated texts, especially summaries and literature reviews!”
Indeed, in this technologically advanced era, a modern and powerful plagiarism checker for teachers is a must for every school.
5. Contract Cheating Prevention
As cheating methods become more sophisticated, authenticity checking software needs to be more advanced. A traditional plagiarism checker will not be able to detect all kinds of digital text modifications and contract cheating. What educators need is an AI-powered plagiarism checker that can verify authorship quickly, effectively, and with substantial evidence.
Emma by Unicheck is an innovative AI-powered contract cheating prevention assistant. Being a part of the Unicheck plagiarism checker, it uses natural language processing (NLP) and stylometry to analyze every piece of submitted text and define the voice and the patterns of an author.
Emma only needs to analyze three 1000-word long pieces written by one author to learn to distinguish their writing. Having done that, the system can tell if the work was written by the writer or not. Emma intends to facilitate academic integrity in higher education and make contract cheating a thing of the past.
Final Thoughts
Educational technology is quickly developing as it tries to keep pace with the demands of the digital age. AI enters the world of education with many potential applications, from the inspiring ones like personalized learning and assessment facilitation to the less favorable ones like advanced cheating. Either way, it’s amazing to see how the digitalization of education and the adoption of AI will shape learning in this decade.
