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akshay-s · 5 years

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How Artificial Intelligence is disrupting the Eductaion System ?

Education is rapidly changing around the world. The new generation of learners is born with digital acumen and the ability to adopt technologies quickly. It is an era where software solutions and advanced devices are facilitating smart classrooms. These smart solutions for education have begun a wave of transformation in the space. Traditionally, schools and higher-education institutions carried out tests and compared the scores of each student against their peers’. We are now beginning to understand that the world of learning is so much wider than classroom coaching and tests. There is so much that kids and adults can learn on their own. To accommodate these shifts, education is transforming, thanks to AI.

1. The Challenges of the traditional Education Processes :

Today, all educational institutions grapple with the following critical challenges: – Providing quality education at scale: Often, educational institutions remain within the confines of their walls. They don’t have the right infrastructure to make education available to larger groups of people beyond their geographies. Also, imparting quality education is a challenge when the knowledge of your teachers is limited. – Making education more accessible: Helping students in rural areas access education has always been a challenge. With infrastructure constraints, there is a need to find out ways we can make education available to remote areas of the world. – Reducing the costs of delivery: While making quality education available at scale, institutions might need to invest a lot. This is an issue for institutions with finite resources! – Optimizing teachers’ time: Teachers are burdened with administrative tasks such as planning teaching materials, marking and grading assessments, checking facts and the sources of the submitted assignments, and so on. This takes time away from teaching and presents itself as a hurdle to their productivity. Many EduTech solutions are hitting the market every day, but the most exciting avenues of disruption come from AI. Artificial Intelligence promises to solve the pressing challenges in the educational space.

As AI techniques such as Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Voice and Speech recognition become more and more sophisticated, they are set to transform the education industry for its instruction and administration capabilities.

In this section, we will explore what exactly can AI do for the education sector.

2. Grading and Assessment :

Teachers spend the majority of their time working on grading and marking assessments. That means a lot of their fruitful, efficient hours are wasted on an activity that can easily be automated. To reduce this burden, institutions are using artificial intelligence-led solutions for automatic essay scoring, reducing the reliance on multiple choice-based questions. These solutions are adding to the holistic learning patterns and ensuring better student comprehension.

3. Resolving In-class Queries :

As classes get more and more crowded, teachers have little time to address individual questions students might have. Using virtual assistants (VA), students can solve their queries themselves by simply looking up on the internet, saving them time and effort of the teachers avoiding repetitive questions. This method also empowers teachers to record and analyze the kind of questions students ask the virtual assistants. This way, teachers can identify weaknesses in comprehension and learning, course-corrections, and their teaching strategy.

4. Personalizing Communication :

As the scale of education expands, personalizing communication with students and their guardians becomes increasingly difficult. Providing students, parents, and teachers access to the right information at any given point of time and from anywhere is an added challenge. AI-fueled chatbots can tackle both the gaps head-on. With chatbots, information can be accessed from anywhere by anyone at reduced costs and improved efficiency. Chatbots can record conversations with each, personalizing the experience more and more each time.

4. One-on-one Customized Guidance :

University education mostly happens in lectures with a lot of students. Therefore, dedicating time to individuals or even small groups can be tricky. Personal virtual tutors powered by AI and ML can do the job. A private virtual tutor can customize learning for each, taking into account their speed of learning and comprehension- providing the necessary support wherever needed.

5. Student Enrolment :

A lot of the student enrolment activities remain the same year after year. Automating these tasks with AI makes a lot of sense for educational institutions. Personalized communication with students can help them enroll in universities with ease. Around-the-clock, an integrated chatbot can answer their many queries before admissions and streamline the entire process of application and enrolment. This would free teachers and other staff from administrative and repetitive work that deserves to be automated.

6. Plagiarism and Authorship Detection :

Graduate and undergrad students sometimes succumb to malpractices such as plagiarism to attempt to win a degree with no effort. Since it is cumbersome for teachers to check each submission for originality, AI can be of help. AI-powered software can help detect plagiarism and assert authorship based on the writing style, grammar, punctuation, and many other factors. By automating this part of education, degree allotment and assessment checking can be made more efficient. There are still challenges that AI and ML have to face before they can be commercialized for use in educational institutions. Here are a few examples of the above: – Teacher’s resistance to change in the wake of the fear of losing their jobs – Challenges in adopting AI technologies at scale after getting buy-in from stakeholders – Lack of funds to set up smart teaching within schools and universities – Ensuring the security of AI-based solutions so that users are comfortable providing all the data these systems need to get the right ROI Even though there are challenges down the road, a few companies are taking leaps and strides in making AI accessible, plausible, and affordable to institutions. Educational organizations willing to take the plunge into AI will gain a massive competitive edge in the market and attract both students and teachers- thereby improving educational standards.

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un-enfant-immature · 6 years

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Tencent-backed homework app jumps to $3B valuation after raising $300M

Academic exams are a big deal in China as they determine the kind of universities, high schools and elementary schools that students get into and to a degree, the future that awaits them.

Parents are thus willing to invest generously to help their children get ahead in school. One startup capitalizing on this need is Yuanfudao, a six-year-old startup that has attracted a line of big-name investors. The company announced this week that it has raised $300 million in a funding round led by existing investor Tencent, China’s largest social networking and gaming company.

Other participants from the round include Warburg Pincus, Matrix Partners China and IDG Capital . The fresh injection raised Yuanfudao’s valuation from around $1 billion at the time it pocketed $120 million in 2017 to exceed $3 billion.

China’s exam-oriented culture has given rise to a billion-dollar tutoring market. As affordable mobile internet becomes common, a lot of that teaching effort is happening online. A report by research firm iResearch shows that China’s online K-12 market will reach 44 billion yuan, or $6 billion, by the end of this year and will more than triple to 150 billion yuan by 2022.

Yuanfudao, which means “ape tutor” in Chinese, administers a suite of services including live courses, a database of exam problems and a popular homework help app. The latter scans homework problems and solves them instantly with the snap of a camera. The startup also operates a research institute for artificial intelligence, which could train its homework app to be smarter.

Yuanfudao claims to serve more than 200 million users, which include students and their parents who use the startup’s apps to check the learning progress of their kids.

Yuanfudao told TechCrunch that it derives the majority of its revenues from selling live courses. It plans to use the proceeds from the latest round to fund investments in research and development of AI as well as improve its apps’ user experience.

The startup is in a heated race to fight for Chinese students and parents. Other companies with similar homework help services include Zuoyebang, which is backed by Chinese search giant Baidu, Coatue Management, Sequoia Capital China and Goldman Sachs. Another one is Yiqizuoye, which counts Singapore sovereign fund Temasek as an investor. A wave of Chinese companies that started with a focus on adult education have also come into the K-12 fray, including New Oriental and 51Talk, which are both listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

#TechCrunch

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williamsjoan · 6 years

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Tencent-backed homework app jumps to $3B valuation after raising $300M

Academic exams are a big deal in China as they determine the kind of universities, high schools and elementary schools that students get into and to a degree, the future that awaits them.

Yuanfudao claims to serve more than 200 million users, which include students and their parents who use the startup’s apps to check the learning progress of their kids.

Tencent-backed homework app jumps to $3B valuation after raising $300M published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years

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Academic exams are a big deal in China as they determine the kind of universities, high schools and elementary schools that students get into and to a degree, the future that awaits them.

Yuanfudao claims to serve more than 200 million users, which include students and their parents who use the startup’s apps to check the learning progress of their kids.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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adamgdooley · 7 years

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Rise of the Virtual Super-Teacher

How AI-powered personalization and immersive technologies are set to fundamentally transform the way we learn.

“It seems to me that it is through this machine that for the first time we will be able to have a one-to-one relationship between information source and information consumer.”

These are the eerily prophetic words of the late Science Fiction author and futurist visionary Isaac Asimov, long before Google became a verb.

“In the old days people would hire a tutor for their children and they’d adapt their teaching to the tastes and abilities of their students. But how many people could afford to hire a pedagogue? Most children went uneducated, and the only way to educate the masses was to have one teacher for a great many students, and to organize this they followed a curriculum. So we either had a one-to-one relationship for the few or a one-to-many relationship for the many, but now, there’s a possibility of a one-to-one relationship for the many. Everyone can have a teacher in the form of the gathered knowledge of the human species.”

Asimov’s tantalizing promise of scaling one-to-one instruction would, quite literally, give students the best of all worlds.

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Now let’s take this one step further, and imagine teaching a class with hundreds of students, yet being able to pay perfect attention to each one, detecting the slightest hint of confusion and projecting the appropriate reaction accordingly. This would give teachers super-powers they could not dream of leveraging in normal classroom environment.

That scenario might actually be much closer than we might think, with the advent of immersive technologies that integrate with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since Virtual Reality (VR) relies on motion capture to work, it already has the inbuilt mechanisms capable of capturing and interpreting body language to create a “digital footprint” of each user.

The next step then is to use AI and machine learning to “teach” systems to filter, adapt and personalize interactions accordingly. It would be the ultimate fulfilment of Asimov’s vision, and something that leading academics in this space have long predicted.

“VR is the most psychologically powerful medium in history,” says Jeremy Bailenson, Communications Professor at Stanford University. In his recently published book Experience on Demand, Bailenson recounts how, although he’s been studying VR and its practical applications since the 1990’s, he is often taken aback by how much more impactful it is compared to other media, particularly where it is applied to learning, which led him to confidently assert that “almost any skill can be improved by virtual instruction.”

In his study of transformed social interaction Bailenson investigated how this could work in practice: “Unlike telephone conversations and video-conferences, interactants in virtual environments have the ability to systematically filter the physical appearance and behavioral actions of their avatars in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real time for strategic purposes. These transformations can have a drastic impact on interactants’ persuasive and instructional abilities.” In other words, the amount of engagement that a teacher’s avatar had with its virtual students had demonstrable impact on their engagement – and consequently in their learning.

The reason which makes VR such an effective and impactful learning tool is that it allows learners to achieve what is known as psychological presence. This essentially means that when we enter a virtual environment, we believe we are present, in spite of our conscious brains telling us that this is indeed a simulation. An important element in achieving such psychological presence is the concept of embodied cognition, which tells us that people absorb information better when performing actions themselves – rather than watching others do so or hearing/reading about them.

“Embodied cognition acknowledges that the mind and body are agents working together to make meaning of our experiences. It’s the idea that our mind alone does not dictate our worldview but instead that our cognition is shaped by the relationship between our mind and our body to inform and navigate our world, make meaning from our environments, and ultimately to result in learning,” explains educational and developmental psychologist Lindsay Portnoy.

Emerging research on VR indicate that the environment is a powerful tool from which we can create meaningful experiences that can effect great changes in our ability to perceive and understand the world around us. One study demonstrated that immersive VR provides better learning of physical movements than a two-dimensional video, and researchers from the University of Chicago found that simple gesturing in elementary students could potentially change and improve their knowledge. Current research by Disney, on the other hand, shows how VR is fast becoming seamless enough to enable it to replicate and synchronize with physical world behaviours such as catching a ball.

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technology will enable such datasets to be leveraged in a responsive and contextual way. This combination of AI and immersive capabilities means that future learning environments will become increasingly personalized, adapting to the individual needs of each user in real-time by analysing their “digital footprint” data.

“I’m reminded of an article I read about a father who felt “super human” while using his Amazon Echo. He and his kids loved interacting with the speaker and found the ability to call Ubers, order pizza and play music to be truly empowering and immersive – it really felt like they were interacting with an actual person,” says Ryan Andal, president and co-founder at Secret Location, who says he’s felt the same “super human” effect while using VR: “When I imagine how many jobs will be lost through automation and AI, I’m encouraged by how VR can combine with AR to allow us to be ‘super human’ and decrease knowledge gaps, learning curves and barriers for collaboration. VR will essentially allow declining markets to rejuvenate much faster than normal because of how powerful it can be as an educational and training tool.”

Andal believes that when VR becomes more accessible and affordable, distance learning could be the medium’s most important use case, opening the doors to spreading education – in its broadest possible sense – into areas typically shut out from it.

“We often think of education in the traditional sense – children in a classroom – but I believe VR is best used for training and learning new skills or trades. In that sense, VR is a complete overhaul of what’s possible! It eliminates the need for expensive materials to practice on and can put students in an array of situations that cannot normally be simulated for training purposes. VR means students will get that coveted “real-life work” experience sooner than usual.”

We are, in fact, already seeing such practical training applications emerging in a broad range of areas. The U.S. alpine team recently turned to VR to allow American racers to memorize the hill and take hundreds of virtual runs down a fast, tricky course in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics. They are the first known Olympic team in the world to utilize virtual reality in their training.

Troy Taylor, high performance director for U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, believes giving a racer the ability to experience the course in VR multiple times ahead of the games gives his team a crucial competitive advantage. STRIVR, the company which developed the simulation, has been working for many years with various sports outfits such as the NFL and NBA to improve athlete’s performance through virtual training. This has been so effective, in fact that some players reported having flashbacks to games they’d only experienced in VR.

Walmart is also leveraging this to train its employees following a successful pilot program last year. The company is also working with STRIVR to incorporate VR more widely in its training. The goal, STRIVR CEO Derek Belch told The Verge in a recent interview, is to put employees in scenarios that would be inconvenient to physically re-create — like dealing with spills, or preparing for a Black Friday shopping spree.

“We’re using computer vision to map scenes, so we literally know exactly where someone’s looking,” says Belch. “Wearers might look around an environment and find the spill, for example, then answer a multiple-choice question about what effect it could have on the store,” he explains.

The global EdTech is set to grow to an estimated $252 billion by 2020, and VR is expected to capture a large proportion of that booming market. The combination of ideological and commercial incentives will therefore likely lead to accelerated development of applications and capabilities that will empower teachers and learners like never before.

Where the Internet has made great strides towards democratizing knowledge, VR will democratize experiences. Immersive technologies represent a revolution in the way we transmit knowledge and will shape how we learn and conduct business more collaboratively in a globalized, boundaryless world.

The implications of this are profound according to Bailenson: “I firmly believe that for people who love to learn, the future is going to be filled with thrilling educational experiences,” he concludes.

For those interested in exploring the potential of Immersive Technologies in Learning, the Global Education and Skills Forum will be hosting an Immersive Learning Showcase and series of insightful discussions on the 17th and 18th March 2018. GESF 2018 is an initiative of the Varkey Foundation to improve standards of education for underprivileged children around the world.