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Around the world, schools, universities and other educational institutions are leveraging Artificial Intelligence as a revolutionary tool to enhance teaching and learning.
Initiatives such as Microsoft’s AI for Good Challenge, Google’s Game Changer Challenge and the NSW Education Department’s Education for a Changing World have showcased the ways in which educators and learners are using AI to develop new educational concepts and enhance design thinking.
Even though many principals, provosts and pupils are still navigating the use and benefits of AI, research has shown promising results in terms of how it is being used to identify areas for improvement in the classroom.
Last year, scientists from the University of Cambridge used AI to develop better predictions of why children struggle at school. Unlike other studies, theirs focused on all children with learning difficulties rather than those who had been given a specific diagnosis, such as autism spectrum disorder and ADHD.
More recently, Dr David Kellermann, senior lecturer in the school of mechanical and manufacturing engineering at UNSW has transformed the learning experience for the Universities engineering students with an AI-infused and Teams-enriched solution while instituting reforms designed to reduce the risk of student dropouts.
Below, The Educator speaks to Ray Fleming, Higher Education Lead at Microsoft, about how universities can leverage AI to remain competitive in the 21st century economy.
TE: The power of leveraging AI across a teaching and learning environment seems to have boundless opportunities. What would you say to Vice-Chancellors who want to harness this technology but aren’t sure where to begin?
RF: As with any new technology, there are many opportunities to use AI to benefit an organisation. With AI the difference is that everybody in the organisation – from the boardroom to the classroom – will benefit from understanding how and why it works and the kind of problems it can help solve (and where it is not the right solution!). Alongside thinking about specific organisation problems, look at the opportunity for the leadership team to learn about the principles and the potential, and spread that interest to others. As the use of AI becomes democratised and more people are able to develop their own AI infused solutions, you’ll need to help your teams stay focused on solving real problems, and not get stuck or side-tracked on niche projects. Retaining students, or making learning more accessible for international students, are real problems that AI can be applied to and which can have institution wide (or sector-wide) impact
TE: You said Dynamics 365 can be a “game-changer” for business of all sizes. Can you elaborate on this?
RF: In education, as with other sectors, the journey of a student can often mean jumping between organisational silos. And we expect the student to be the one making the journey. With Dynamics 365 there’s a chance to follow the whole student’s lifecycle, and to deal with them as an individual right across the organisation, because every element of their journey can be recorded and managed in one place. The prospective student becomes the applicant who becomes the first year student, and so on. Having all that information in one place makes it possible to treat them as an individual, and join together their journey. And it avoids them having to move between half a dozen departments to get an answer to a simple question, because every staff member can have the full picture.
TE: Moving forward, in what ways will Microsoft be building on the impactful work it is doing in the space of AI and education to ensure that the higher education space realises the significant benefits of infusing this technology into teaching and learning frameworks?
RF: The way that Dr Kellermann has used AI technology to lead change, and personalise learning, for his students is a world-leading example of new ways of teaching. Working with Dr Kellermann, we’ve been able to modify our products to make it easier for these leading edge ideas to be created and integrated into the technology that teachers already have in the classroom. The easier we can make this, then the more teachers and lecturers will be able to give their students similar experiences. We can make technology more accessible, and our professional development leaders can help other teaching staff to develop its use in their own teaching.