Alexander the Great was lucky. During his teenage years, he had his very own tutor – Aristotle. From poetry to physics, politics to biology, the great polymath’s knowledge was imparted to the young prince.
In an ideal world, we would all have our own Aristotle – someone who would be there whenever their student needed them, who could adapt to a personal learning style or pace.
For economic and social reasons, this type of education has always been the privilege of only the very wealthiest, and we still need to recruit millions more teachers just to meet the UN’s 2030 target of providing basic school education for all.
But what if could get closer to this ideal with the use of Artificial Intelligence – what if we could give every student their own virtual tutor?
At Pearson our mission is to help people make progress in their lives through learning. In the last decade, that has seen us lead the digital transformation of teaching in American colleges - combining the very best content with new assessment and feedback tools to make learning more personalised and effective.
Students who previously thought a college education was out of their reach are gaining their degree through our new online courses, launched in partnership with leading universities.
Personalised learning offers even bigger opportunities to enable better teaching - giving deeper insights into student progress, making courses more engaging, and providing early alerts to teachers so they help quickly help struggling students.
Every one of these steps is helping us make learning more effective and rewarding for teachers and students.
But we know that the next phase of developments that AI brings to education will enable us to do more than anything we have seen so far.
Our new partnership marks an important stage in our journey - bringing IBM’s world-leading cognitive computing technology together with Pearson’s knowledge of teachers, students and the science of learning.
By combining Pearson’s most advanced personalised education courseware with the power of IBM’s ‘Watson’, we plan to create a virtual tutor at a scale never before seen.
The tutor will be able to ‘learn’ a given subject through taking in documents and data, provide answers to questions from students, and interact with students using natural language. It will adapt to a student’s individual learning style, providing explanations of concepts a student is finding hard, and directing them back to material they may want to study again.
When speaking about the potential for AI in education, I’ve often been asked whether it will mean that machines will replace teachers. My answer is - quite simply - no.
With AI, we might see driverless cars but we will not see teacherless classrooms.
I do not believe that any machine could be as engaging or inspiring as a good teacher. Instead, human teachers could be supported by AI tutors, so that they have more time to focus on what they do best – creating positive classroom environments, planning exciting lessons, and developing richer more personal connections with each individual student.
If we get this right, the advances we will make could not come at a more necessary time. The pressure on schools and universities is growing. Problems such as teacher retention and achievement gaps have to be tackled for us to make sure that education itself thrives in the coming decades.
Ever increasing advances in technology are changing our economies, our social lives and jobs. If education is going to keep pace with an evolving world and job market, we must make sure that teachers have access to the best that new technologies have to offer.
Ultimately, there will be many different applications of cognitive computing and AI in the world of education, as my colleagues and leading academics from University College London explain in more detail.
We know that there will be challenges, and that new ways of thinking will have to be developed. But by putting the needs of teachers and students first, and through drawing on expert partners like IBM Watson, we are taking important steps towards creating ever more powerful and effective resources for the world of education.
