Technology has always played an important role in education, but its current use is more prevalent than ever, thanks to the increased availability of smart devices and web-based curriculum. A new dimension has been added with swift advances in the field of artificial intelligence.
The National Education Policy of 2020, or NEP 2020, recognizes the immense potential of AI and recommends its integration into the education system. To increase technology integration in schools, the CBSE introduced artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things into the school curriculum in October last year for classes 6th to 10th.
AI has the potential to transform education by making it more efficient, effective and accessible to students worldwide. However, experts say it is crucial to ensure that the use of AI in education is ethical and responsible and that it complements the work of human teachers rather than replacing them.
Today, technology is advancing so fast that we can put even thousands of books on a small hard disk and there is also enormous information on the internet. But having greater access to large amounts of information is of no use unless we are able to study, comprehend, and critically think about it. These are the processes of learning, so therefore, on the one hand, we have enormous amounts of information available to us because of technological advances; on the other hand, unless we emphasize the importance of studying, reading, comprehending and understanding, real learning will not happen.
So when our educational processes make our students good learners, that is when we say that we have provided them with quality education. Quality education here means that we are enabling our students to acquire knowledge and skills and use these knowledge and skills in a proficient manner to find pragmatic solutions to pressing challenges in their lives and work.
So the goal of introducing AI in education is to enhance the learning experience of these students so that outcomes are enhanced and the student becomes more creative and a good learner.
AI is a very fundamental technology; it is perhaps as fundamental as electricity, and much like electricity, it shares things. It’s not at that level as a separate subject, but it has to be embedded across everything that we are doing and teaching students. The latest developments in generative AI, like ChatGPT, have brought AI to the forefront, and we’ve realized the power of it. Generative AI can generate ideas, essays, thesis, papers, paragraphs, and language, so it has a direct impact on how students can do their coursework, etc., and also how they can use it to do their coursework better. So it’s not that these things will replace the student’s abilities, but someone using them could do better than the other students. However powerful and wonderful these technologies are, especially generative AI, they have a very dark and unethical side. School students are uniquely placed; hence, we can start teaching the students about what is fair and not fair, whether it’s true or fake news, how to detect it, how to figure it out, whether this is AI-generated or human-generated, and as the students grow up, ethics will be ingrained in them.
One aspect is how we change the educational landscape all together by using AI and that is where the fundamental challenge lies. We might have to revise our national education policy within a couple of years as ChatGPT4 develops. From ethical, learning and evaluation perspectives, our whole educational system is based on a fundamental evaluation model. We evaluate a person after doing certain things; we ask them to write a thesis; if it is conducted for school students, they have to go through certain exams, essays, or assignments.
Everything of that sort could be conducted using assistive technology and without getting caught in plagiarism, the whole model of research and evaluation would work. We’ll have to bring in that perspective of ethics from the evaluation perspective. If you look at the overall picture, artificial intelligence will be the biggest equalizer in the educational sector. UGC has done phenomenal work in terms of making online classrooms available, and through it, IITs and NIITs are made available for rural students. This is a great equalizer because these rural areas have technology and high-speed internet available through the Digital India program and we find the best of the content available from the best of the features. What AI would change is that now we will have personalized assistive learning, where we can evaluate, assist and teach a person according to his ability.
By using AI, we can create smart content and do smart evaluation according to the learning patterns of individual students. Now, by using technology like conversational AI, which is available 24×7, everybody can learn using the same best quality teacher because AI will be the sum of the best knowledge of every teacher. We have to see how you teach students by using AI with ethics and how you use AI itself in the educational system to transform the entire system.
All stakeholders will have to keep pace with the developments in the field of AI, new things coming up every day in the field of artificial intelligence, the integration of AI in the field of education and the way it must be used. This is the insight on the use of artificial intelligence in the field of education: the key elements, the key opportunities, the potential, how to leverage that potential and work on those opportunities, but at the same time also keeping in mind the ethical challenges and working around them or finding solutions for those challenges.
(The author is an Advocate by Profession)
