Students face an enormous amount of pressure during their school and college years. Being in a constant cycle of working hard to get good grades while balancing extracurriculars is not easy, and the stress that comes with test-taking and difficult classes can be extremely difficult to deal with. The development of various AI technologies can help students with their education, make things easier for teachers, and has the potential to revolutionize the education industry. One frustrating thing about being a student is not having 24/7 access to someone that can help you when you get stuck on a concept or question problem. This becomes possible with AI tutors.
An AI tutor is a computer program that uses AI to provide educational assistance to students. One of the biggest pros of AI tutors is that they are always available, so you can get help at any time of the day. AI tutors also provide immediate feedback, so students can get a faster response compared to emailing their professors with questions. Many of today’s AI tutors can only help with right or wrong answers because the technology isn’t that advanced yet. However, several companies are starting to develop more advanced AI tutors that can help students with a wider range of questions.
The Implications of AI in Education
The launch of ChatGPT 3.0 created a buzz around college campuses everywhere as students began asking “is this something I could use to help with my assignments?” Although the bot can definitely provide students with an additional bump to jumpstart their projects, the bot itself is far from being an end-all for student work. But even so, the presence of this new tool puts pressure on educators everywhere to start considering how AI will reshape the world of education. One of the most obvious realms in which AI has the chance to significantly impact the educational process lies within the content of student work. Although not a student favorite, homework is the most common, and oftentimes only, way in which educators promote learning outside of class. But, whether it’s students using chatbots to write their essays or to solve their math problems, there are progressively more and more chances for students to submit work that is not entirely their own. This advancement poses serious concerns as to how students will learn the material as not doing the work themselves will impede their ability to absorb and understand the material. One potential remedy to this situation, however, could be the slow eradication of homework as a whole, with teachers instead relying more heavily on in-class activities rather than out-of-class assignments to help ingrain information into students. Although homework has shown to be at least mildly beneficial [7], there are also serious inequity issues brought about by it. A 2009 study [8] conducted by the Federal Communication Commission found that roughly 70% of teachers assign homework requiring internet access. Furthermore, an analysis [9] conducted by the Pew Research Center of a 2013 American Community Survey showed that low-income families, and specifically ethnic minority families, are much less likely than higher-income groups to have access to broadband internet. If educators began to rely less on homework, it’s possible that it might begin to bridge what has become coined as the “homework gap”.
This best-case scenario is possible and achievable, but it is not the path we are currently on. In order for it to occur, pressure needs to be placed on our politicians to enact legislation that would promote the above ideas. On the individual level, everyone should aim to learn how AI works, what its drawbacks and limitations are, and how it can be best used in a safe and ethical manner. Doing so would make it much easier for this incredible tool to be both accessible and useful to everyone, and that’s a future we should all strive to create.
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