This article originally appeared in Issue 46 of the UKEdMagazine. Click here to view.
Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic at the moment, with estimates varying wildly about how many jobs will be replaced by machine learning algorithms. Whatever the outcome, in reality, it is clear that schools will need to change, in order to prepare their students for the resulting impact on society and the skills needed for future employment.
Perhaps even more significantly for the teaching profession, adaptive learning systems have the potential to provide a truly personalised learning experience for students. By using vast quantities of data, analysing a particular student’s responses, the speed of progress, even facial expressions, these systems promise to provide highly detailed feedback and a uniquely tailored programme of learning, which even the most dedicated and experienced teachers would struggle to compete with.
Given all this, what place is there for teachers in the classroom of the future? There are, perhaps, still reasons to be optimistic, although the role of the teacher will inevitably change.
Perhaps the future of teaching will involve coaching and mentoring students, focusing on their performance and intellectual characteristics (for example, resilience, independence and resourcefulness), while the majority of content delivery, assessment and feedback is dealt with by machine learning algorithms.
@AIConf2018 Assistant Head (Digital Strategy) – Wells, Somerset
You need to Login or Register to bookmark/favorite this content.
Although its tempting to believe that teachers roles will change and software will change our roles rapidly, this is highly unlikely to happen. In a world where Fortnite makes a fortune the state of educational software is far, far behind. There simply isn’t the desire from programmers to create these kinds of models, governments have a terrible record in implementing any kind of database, so we can pretty much rest easy for quite a while!