In an experiment by IBM or International Business Machines, students were tasked with

finding an artificially intelligent teaching assistant among eight other human assistants. In the

end, the students found the non-human assistant because of how quickly and easily it could solve

their problems. The bot was then recommended for a teaching award (AI-Powered). Nowadays,

technology like this is becoming possible through the use of artificial intelligence or AI. AI is the

next step in technology where computer programs will be able to solve problems that would

normally require humans with the help of people training them. When people imagine AI, the

first thought that goes through their heads is evil robots trying to take over the world or computer

programs on a mission to destroy humans as is seen in many movies. In reality, AI is nothing like

what is seen in the media. It is actually “​​smart machines capable of performing tasks that

typically require human intelligence” (Artifical). These machines are able to process much more

data than a human could possibly ever do but what sets AI apart from other programs is its

ability to write its own program and adapt instead of following a strict set of instructions.

Like humans, well-created AI is able to make decisions on its own but it is also able to

make millions of computations that a human brain cannot handle. AI being able to make

important choices and adapt to new scenarios often scares people because of the “threat” that is

posed by a being like that. The truth is that AI is made to fill specific roles and is trained to do

only that. An example is the Google search engine, which “is powered by AI” (Dilmegani). It is

trained to give search results based on what is popular and does exactly that. It is a difficult

process that requires Google to store over ten quintillion bytes of data, or ten billion gigabytes,

something only a program could process. (Gavin). This shows that AI is a reliable tool that can

benefit humanity in many ways. One area that I want to explore the impact of AI is education.

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 Education is an area that has not changed much in the past one hundred years.

“Classrooms today would be recognisable to the Victorians who invented them” (Chase). We

have technology available to us now and the curriculum has evolved but the way and the order in

which material is taught has not altered. This leads people to wondering, what can be done to

improve education? One answer that people have is to “develop personalized learning to

overcome the challenge presented by standardized learning” (TechnoFunc). This seems like it

may be simple to put people in classes they like but it is also important to place students in

classes that will fit their specific learning style. In the end, creating a personalized learning plan

for each student is a task only AI can take on. This is only one way that AI can be used to change

education and, as a student who has done independent study in the past, I want to explore how

else AI can evolve education. How is artificial intelligence used in education and how will it

continue to influence learning?

To fully understand how AI affects education, it is important to learn about what AI is

because it is such a difficult topic to grasp. I spoke to Kamal Mistry, the CEO of Arcturus, to

learn about AI and how it can be used. The first important distinction that he made was between

different types of AI. “There is supervised and unsupervised AI” (Mistry). According to him,

most AI today is supervised. This means that the AI is specifically trained in a task and is then

allowed to perform the task on its own. For example, when Mistry worked at Netflix, he used

supervised AI to determine the most important parts of content to automatically create a poster

and trailer. This AI had to be taught what scenes were the most important while leaving out parts

that would be deemed inappropriate. This involved teaching the AI what is inappropriate through

a neural network. A neural network is “a means of doing machine learning, in which a computer

learns to perform some task by analyzing training examples” (Hardesty). Often though, there are

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situations where something occurs which the neural network is not confident with, this is called

an “edge case.” Mistry informed me that, when he was working at Uber ATG, he had to deal

with lots of edge cases while working on self-driving cars. An example of this would be

something that is not commonly seen on the road like animals crossing or an electric scooter.

Something like this would normally create a problem for the AI so when edge cases are present,

the AI needs to be able to use unsupervised learning to adapt to this new unfamiliar situation.

Unsupervised learning was used to identify objects that the AI was not familiar with using

computer vision. Computer vision is when “unsupervised learning algorithms are used for visual

perception tasks, such as object recognition” (IBM). I continued my research into AI and learned

about another type of AI, reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is used when a

machine needs to learn “to make a sequence of decisions” (Osiński). This type of learning has

the machine employ a trial-and-error strategy to solve the problems. The AI attempts similar

challenges constantly until it eventually learns how to solve that specific problem and will use

that knowledge on obstacles that are alike. This strategy has been demonstrated best when

teaching an AI how to play a game like a maze or chess.

` Now that I have researched the different types of AI, I will be able to understand how AI

can be applied to education and what type of learning is needed to develop a system that can

improve people’s education. Along with personalizing the curriculum for students, AI can help in

many other ways and I intend to delve deep into each method where machine learning can be

used. Researchers and developers have discussed using AI to improve education through

tutoring, quick responses to questions, constant, accessing learning, and automating simple tasks

for teachers (Karandish). The first method in which AI can be used to revolutionize education is

through tutoring. When I spoke to Mistry about AI, he mentioned that machine learning would

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be able to detect weaknesses in student’s education better than any tutor or teacher would. It

would be able to analyze much more data about a student and much quicker than any human

could ever do. As David Karandish, founder of AI-based company Capacity, states, “While no

chatbot can truly replace an educator, AI tools can help students sharpen their skills and improve

weak spots outside of the classroom.” Another way that AI tutors have helped is through

knowing every way to solve certain problems. When tutoring math, a student may be more

comfortable with a method that a teacher does not know and the AI would be able to detect what

methods usually work with that specific student. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University,

such as Ken Koedinger and Daniel Weitekamp III, have worked on developing an online tutor

based on machine learning that is able to do just that. It will be able to process what kind of

learning the student is more susceptible to and teach in that way (Spice). These tutors will be

capable of giving students quick responses to any question they have.

Often when students are struggling with homework, they reach out to peers, teachers, or

tutors for help but do not receive responses before assignments are due. Using an AI tutor or

AI-assissted learning software, a student will be able to receive their answers almost

immediately. On average, AI-based chatbots are able to respond to questions from a student

within 2.7 seconds (Karandish). Many schools currently give students access to databases with

huge amounts of information but it is often inconvenient to search because some documents may

be difficult to find among the large number of other resources. AI provides the perfect solution to

this by being able to incorporate these databases into its neural networks and using that

information to instantly respond to any fact-based question a student may have using real

documents as proof. I spoke to Igal Dvir, the VP of Technology & Products at BriefCam, to learn

about how AI can generate the best possible result from a dataset. He said that tasks like this are

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mostly done using numerical data but it is also seen in the Google search engine and other

chatbots like the one IBM has developed. Dvir believes that being able to navigate databases so

easily will offer students access to materials that will help research. Introducing this type of

supervised AI into learning will “upgrade the knowledge base model and help schools improve

how students get answers” (Ocelot).

Additionally, an AI-based chatbot will be able to access resources outside the database

and incorporate other scholarly articles that may have useful information that a student would not

be able to reach by simply searching the database. “The power of content in an existing

knowledge base can be magnified by AI pulling in approved published content in all forms and

mediums” (Ocelot). Many AI-driven tools, like what is described, are already in use across the

nation at schools such as UCLA, Northeastern University, and University of Florida with over

eight million interactions with the AI being made. Along with being able to access databases,

these tools have been used to give information on upcoming assignments, monitor a student’s

learning plan, and provide feedback on work. Using an AI chatbot to answer questions will also

make learning resources accessible at any time.

Because these AI-assissted resources are available online, they provide a service that can

be accessed at any time and from anywhere that has an internet connection. Having these

services available allows students to learn from an AI tutor or with the help of AI tools even if

they are unable to access a real classroom. Technology like this is already being used to help

students that speak other languages or have visual or hearing impairments by providing a real

time translation (Marr). Having universal access to these tools also helps students who are at

home sick or are at a different learning level to stay caught up with the curriculum that is being

taught at school. This can also help students that are attending school online continue to learn

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without being restricted by the lack of access to a teacher or tutor (Karandish). There are many

resources such as the AI for Good Foundation that specialize in promoting the use of AI to create

inclusive learning for all (Hodson). Using virtual tutors and personalized learning paths,

resources like this have made classrooms universally accessible. All the benefits of using

machine learning in education also help make learning more available to people that do not have

access to a normal education. Personalized learning paths, AI-based tutors, and chatbots also

help make learning easier for students and grants education to more people but AI can also

benefit those on the other side of learning, the teachers.

Educators are required to grade work, plan lessons, and perform other administrative

tasks that all take up hours of their time every day. However, with the assistance of AI, many of

these tasks will become much easier to execute. Currently, it is estimated that teachers spend

31% of their time doing these tasks and with the help of automated tools, teachers will be able to

spend more time giving students personalized teaching that will help them improve (Karandish).

Simple machines are already able to score multiple-choice tests and automatic scoring has been

used for years but AI is able to analyze written responses. Using similar technology to what is

used to collect information from databases, AI is able to compare to what is written on the tests

and properly score them based on correct information and supporting arguments (Marr). AI will

also be able to improve admissions processes for programs by analyzing documents and giving

educators all the important information from applications. Teachers can also rely on tools such as

AI tutors and personalized learning plans to help students get the best education possible while

not spending so much time developing rigorous programs for each student. These programs help

both parties in learning by providing easy methods for tasks that are often difficult. Because

machine learning-assisted tools are also universally accessible, they have helped teachers make

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accommodations for students. This has benefitted students that are not physically in class or

during the COVID-19 pandemic when school was online (Flynn). Many of these tools that assist

teachers may even use very basic AI such as Google Classroom or Zoom. Currently, many of the

tools used to help education are analysis-based but as technology progresses, AI will be able to

assist in even more ways.

As AI and machine learning are used more throughout education, they will continue to

benefit the students’ learning and change a teacher’s priorities in the classroom. This shift is

often a cause of worry for people as they believe that the teacher’s job will ultimately be replaced

by AI. In the classroom of the future, some tasks like lecturing may become the machine’s role,

connecting with a student and ensuring they are on the right path could never be replaced by a

machine. “While AI programs can teach students literacy or math, the more complex impartation

of social and emotional skills will remain in the domain of humans” (Role). Within the next

decade, AI will completely change education. Calum Chace, a writer and speaker on the future

impact of AI, predicts “basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic” will be able to be

taught at an earlier age. He also believes that other improvements to education will change it

more than it has in the past one hundred years (Chace). Tasks like “the recruitment of students,

onboarding them in schools and universities, reminding and cajoling them to submit coursework,

assessing some of their work,” and even leading discussions will all fall to AI-driven tools

(Chace). This highlights how AI can be used today and how it will continue to improve. As AI

continues to evolve, education will only be enhanced for the students.

In my research, I have defined what AI is, found how it helps both students and

educators, and looked beyond to how AI will influence learning in the future. Utilizing different

types of learning (supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement) will help maximize AI’s potential

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as it continues to provide students with universally accessible tools. The personalized learning

plans, AI tutors, and chatbots will continue to revolutionize education as they are incorporated

more into basic education. When imagining a classroom of the future, AI is what will bring it to

that point. Learning does not need to stay stagnant; it can evolve with technology just as other

areas have. Artificial intelligence will improve education to help prepare future generations for

life in the modern world.