Commercial Integrator March 2023 - 42

Education
Is AI Helping or Hurting Education?
The answer is, of course, complex. AI certainly provides benefits in
education contexts, but they're counterbalanced by notes of caution.
By James King
THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF BUZZ around artificial intelligence
(AI) and how it can be both beneficial and harmful to
our everyday lives. One sector that has seen a lot of discussion
about AI is higher education. AI presents benefits and harms
to higher education, and we'll explore both sides here. However,
before we tumble down that rabbit hole, we first must define
what we mean by the term " AI. "
Let's use a simple definition for AI in this context. AI refers
to a machine that provides a service to humans and that's
tailored to that human or to that space. The keyword in my
discussion on AI is " tailored. " By that, I mean that, if two
different humans use the same product with the same input,
the output would be different. This also holds true if the same
product is placed into two different spaces: The output would
be tailored to each space.
Now that we have an understanding of the meaning and
context of AI, let's look at the harms and benefits of AI in
higher-education settings.
Potential Harms
Let's start with potential harms that AI might cause to higher
education. When you boil AI down to its root, it is still based
on binary math. What that means is it is either 0 or 1, yes or no,
correct or wrong, etc. In short, there's no real reading between
the lines.
Predictive work: Predictive work can be an exam, a quiz or
an assignment that is taken on an AI system. The idea behind
this is that the AI system will continue to give you work in areas
that you are struggling with. For example, if you were given
an assignment on animals and you really knew your reptiles
but did not know mammals, you would get more questions on
mammals and fewer on reptiles. The issue with this type of AI,
as alluded to above, is that it boils things down to correct or
incorrect. This is based on variables put into the AI system. For
a simplified example, if a question arose asking you to name a
mammal that hangs upside down inside caves and you typed
in " bat, " but the expected answer was " bats, " the AI system
might mark it wrong. By contrast, a human would realize that
you knew the answer.
Learning the basics: We all need to learn to crawl before we
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Commercial Integrator MARCH 2023
can learn to walk. This is building the base of our knowledge
before moving on to more advanced skills. As AI enters our education
system, we are losing the baseline knowledge and skills
that are required to cultivate more advanced skills. Students
are now using AI systems to write papers, find answers to
questions and even attend their virtual classes; in the process,
they're missing the opportunity to develop those baselines.
I predict that, as AI becomes ingrained in our daily lives,
the old arguments we've heard about students using calculators
will be transmuted into arguments about AI. Before
smartphones became so widely used, teachers used to say,
" You won't always have a calculator wherever you go. " Now,
though, we just whip out our phones, enter an equation
into the calculator and have our answer within a matter of
seconds. The teacher was wrong - we will always have that
calculator. We don't need to show our work, and we didn't
need to get paper to work out the problem.
The downside here comes back to gaining the knowledge
to understand whether the answer is correct. If you ask an
AI system to write a paper for you, how do you know whether
it's correct? How do you know the spelling is correct? How
do you know the grammar is correct? How do you know
whether the subject is presented accurately? If everyone
lacks baseline knowledge, no one will know if the information
presented is correct or incorrect.
Potential Helps
Of course, there are just as many benefits to using AI. Now,
we turn to those.
Predictive work: Earlier, we discussed how predictive work
could be detrimental. However, predictive systems can be
beneficial, as well. If there is a classroom full of students,
we know that each of those students has a different level of
understanding of the subject matter. There might be a student
who really understands the subject, whereas another is
struggling. It is very difficult for a human teacher to structure
their lesson so that it's at the right pace and level for each
and every student. An AI-based predictive system can be that
teacher, giving each student the pace and level that they need
to fully understand the subject.
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Commercial Integrator March 2023

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