Revolutionizing Education: AI and ChatGPT Enhance Personalized Learning for Students
CXOToday has engaged in exclusive interview with Ravi Bhushan, Founder & CEO, BrightCHAMPS
- How can AI and ChatGPT enhance personalized learning experiences for students?
One of the biggest challenges within education is that of access to quality learning at scale, and at affordable prices. Live learning, customisations within learning material, and one-on-one learning become the domain of only those with a high purchasing power because of the cost involved, even in countries like ours that have a price arbitrage advantage due to availability of professionally qualified teaching talent. This is unfortunate, because not every child learns the same way or prefers the same format of learning material. Some want to read, others want to watch, some learn through dialogue. Some kids are able to understand and retain their learning when they use it for analytical proble-solving personally, others learn best when they brainstorm collaboratively. AI tools can help create learning contexts that cater to all these needs of a child to create experiences that lead to superior learning outcomes. And, because AI learns from itself, it can keep improving these experiences without extensive human intervention once frameworks for what needs to be considered and ignored have been set. And finally, equally importantly, AI can create these experiences at prices that are affordable by the masses, not a select few, which is a massive barrier that is finally being broken in the quest to ensure access to quality education for all.
- How do you perceive the role of teachers in the AI revolution within the education sector, and what steps can they take to prepare themselves for this technological shift?
Contrary to popular belief, I believe that the role of the teacher will become even more important. Teaching will become a more focussed and value-driven undertaking, once logistical, managerial, and repetitive tasks are eliminated from their abundance of responsibilities. This will mean that they will spend more time teaching instead of devoting big chunks of time in assessment – which will now be done in a qualitative and quantitative manner through AI. This also means that teachers will have far greater insights and the ability to ask AI tools specific questions about their students’s patterns, all of which will be available to them after analysis of multiple data points by AI, instantaneously. These are very powerful capabilities for teachers to have at the tips of their fingers. The ability to have so much detailed information and insights practically on demand will enrich every classroom classroom experience for both the students and the teachers, resulting in learning outcomes like we have never seen before. Teachers will also be able to impact a far greater number of students in the same, or even lesser amount of time, which will improve their own quality of life and satisfaction from their vocation.
- What are the possible challenges that teachers and students both might encounter when integrating AI and ChatGPT into their teaching as well as learning methods?
Misuse and abuse, like is the case for every technology. Ultimately, technology, no matter how powerful, is as effective as the people using them and the intention they are using it with. You can use multimodal generatie AI to engage in Socratic dialogue, open yourself up to diverse points of view, and learn about newer things. Or you can use it to plagiarise or find shortcuts. Sure, there can be tools to detech these cheats and shortcuts, but the race to thwart your opponent will never end. For every tool, there can be a cheating hack, and for every hack, there can be a more sophiticated policing tool. AI can help students and teachers unlock all the potential that was untapped due to human constraints and issues of access.
4. How do you ensure that the integration of AI and ChatGPT in your edtech solutions maintains a balance between technology-driven learning and the human touch, ensuring that teachers remain essential in the educational process
We’re in the process of building a tool that will be an AI tool that will serve as a personal tutor for each child, so that learning is not impeded due to geographical constraints or time zones. We’re currently in the process of training our tool within the multiple contexts of our curriculum. For example, if a Grade 5 student is learning compound interest within the financial literacy course through a story, the AI tutor will ask and answer questions to the student using references from the story. If another student is learning the same module by way of video material, the tutor will use those references. This will help us enable a combination of live classes led by teacher instruction, as well as asynchronous, student-led learning outside of the classroom. We’re using GPT 3.5 currently. The next phase of this personal tutor tool will also be to train it to engage the student in Socratic dialogue – as in ‘why do you think this way’ and making students defend their thought processes while encouraging them to dig deeper to see if there is an alternate solutions or answers to the one they’ve landed on. This will mean that every time a student steps into class, the level of preparedness and pre-work will be phenomenal, so the human teacher can focus on higher-order tasks that require socio-emotional competency – because learning and teaching is not a mechanical process, it is a deeply emotional one. AI can vastly improve the learning experience of a child by pushing them to think and question, and it can improve the teaching experience by giving teachers minute insights into a child’s learning progress and challenges, but it cannot read a student’s emotions or hesitancies and react to them in a manner that creates a connection between the student, teacher, and their shared experience. I can’t say if there will come a time when AI will be evolved enough to cater to emotions, but for now and the foreseeable future, I see AI complementing teachers, not replacing them.
