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Hollywood has completely spoilt us, hasn’t it? In the pretext of coming up with new plot lines for films, all they have shown are how robots and artificially intelligent machines would take over the world. From robot apocalypse to hardware chip that could rewire human thought processes, we’ve seen them all.

But in reality, artificial intelligence is here to help us. It strives to work with us, make our lives better and in fact do more than the current manpower can do. In the education sector, especially, artificial intelligence is revolutionising the way classes are being taken. Throwing some stats, it is estimated that the use of artificial intelligence in education will grow by over 47.5% in the US alone.

Apart from making classroom sessions more interesting and immersive, they are also making it easier for school or college administrators to run their institutions and parents to understand their kids better.

This post is all about shedding light on how intelligent devices are enhancing the learning experience of students, leaving you regretting over the fact that you are too old to get back to a modern-day school.

Here are 5 ways artificial intelligence is revolutionising the education sector.

It Allows Teachers to Focus Just on Teaching

Analysis on the time spent by teachers today reveals that they get to spend only 15% of their time teaching. The rest of their time is distributed across planning lessons, grading and assessing student performance, taking care of a few administrative tasks and more.

When teachers are able to deliver only 15% of the task they are primarily required to do, it’s okay to assume that only half, which is close, to 8%, is translated into student assimilation of the information. In that 8%, if we could assume only half is processed and the rest if forgotten, the entire purpose of education becomes futile.

That’s where intelligent devices come into action. Thanks to rapid advancements in the edtech sector and the availability of perceptive intelligent devices, a lot of redundant tasks like student performance analysis, attendance and more can be automated. So now, a teacher can focus more on lesson planning and teaching.

Sentiment Analysis

So far, our experiences in the classroom have been only passive. When a teacher conducts a class, he or she doesn’t completely know who pays attention, who zones out, who has difficulty comprehending a particular subject and more. The teacher conducts a generic session without having personalised information about those in the class.

But today, smart devices inside the classroom can detect faces and leverage the potential of machine learning to identify interests, emotions and other expressions and gauge students’ attention levels and visualise them into charts.

This happens for individual subjects, allowing teachers to understand the interests of students and work on them. One of the best aspects about these devices are that the privacy of both teachers and students is retained. With sentiment analysis, teachers are empowered with more information about students, their classes, the way they plan their sessions and timing of the classes for them to optimise their sessions.

It Paves Way for Immersive Learning

Imagine this, you are in a session on Young’s Double Slit Experiment. In a conventional classroom, you are there sitting at your desk, passively taking in the concept of electrons behaving both like a particle and a wave. As your teacher starts explaining about the ripples and the observer effect, you get lost.

Now, visualise the same scenario in a classroom that has AI-powered smart devices. As your teacher speaks, you are shown relevant images, videos and other graphic elements to help you get a clear picture of what you’re learning.

In such a scenario, you never have to memorise what you learnt because the visuals will always take you back to the concept. For subjects like math, chemistry and biology, things only get better. Such an environment eliminates distraction and zoning out of students because the videos and graphics keep captivating them, the study material is easy to share and there is way to make the session interactive as well.

Immersive and not passive learning has a deeper impact in the minds of students and the more involved they are in a class, the better is their hold on the subject.

Missed and Remote Sessions

With artificial intelligence powered devices, gone will be the days students have to get in touch with their classmates to copy notes on what happened during their absence. The problem with this method is students are taking only a fragmented portion of information from the entire session.

There is no holistic information or a direct way to catch up with the day’s academic progress. But with modern devices, students can revisit the sessions of the day through video recordings or even attend classrooms from their home or remote through smartphone apps. Being virtually present for a session is more practical than learning from second-hand or even third-hand information.

A More Active Involvement of Parents

Though parent-teacher meeting that happens on a quarterly or a monthly basis is good, the reports that parents get to hear from teachers are generic and not personalised to the extent they would intend to hear. They are based more on the performance in a single series of examination and not the everyday progress a student makes in his or her studies. As a parent, it makes more sense for them to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their kids and not just get scores or grades from teachers.

This has been the convention but the scenario is increasingly changing these days. On a single dashboard of smart devices, parents can view the overall performance of their kids, break them down into diverse subjects, get an idea of their strengths, weakness and grey areas, attendance, attentiveness and any factor you could name. This promotes a better understanding among parents, teachers and students and eliminates the comparison between one student and the other.

So, what do you think? Artificial intelligence can actually change knowledge is imparted and shared in the coming years. If mankind has evolved so much coming from a conventional classroom set up, imagine the head start kids today would get in terms of education. This not just makes subjects interesting but learning perineal as well.

Let us know on the comments what you think about the future of education.