● Artificial intelligence can play a key role in education by adapting learning paths to the individual needs of students.
● AI tools provide teachers with valuable insights into their students' progress and challenges, facilitating more effective pedagogical decisions.
● With techniques like machine learning and clustering, AI offers a new approach to teaching, providing personalized solutions for each student and group.
According to a study (in French), 85% pupils have already used ChatGPT to do their homework, prompting some teachers to stop giving written homework. But does this use of AI really enable learning? And should we worry about the impact of AI on education?
Using machine learning techniques, AI algorithms can analyse traces left by pupils to pinpoint their individual levels.
In reality, AI is not just ChatGPT, and many AI systems can play an essential role in education. First and foremost, AI can create personalized learning paths for pupils. When pupils drop out, it is because their schoolwork does not match their abilities. It is either too difficult and they don’t understand or it’s too easy and they are bored. Using machine learning techniques, AI algorithms can analyse traces left by pupils to pinpoint their individual levels. Not only can AIs recommend exercises, which are not too easy or too difficult, AIs can also give hints, personalized feedback, and motivational messages to encourage pupils or help them in the event of difficulty. This is reinforcement learning.
AI can also provide valuable aid to teachers. It can help with assessments and getting to know classes and provide feedback on progress and alerts when pupils face difficulties or get stuck. AI techniques like can group similar learning traces into clusters that can be used to automatically divide classes into groups of pupils with similar profiles. All this information and these weak signals can only be accessed via AI. Equipped with AI dashboards, teachers can finally make fully informed decisions and truly do their jobs. AIs in schooling software should therefore be configured according to these principles to be truly effective in education.
In artificial intelligence, clustering involves unsupervised algorithms detecting similarities between data to then structure and divide them into different groups.
Catherine de Vulpillières
She is an associate professor of modern literature, and co-founded Éditions Lampsaque in 1998. In 2017, she created EvidenceB with Thierry de Vulpillières, former director of educational partnerships at Microsoft. The company is an EdTech that develops adaptive learning modules to benefit educational systems.
