The role of Artificial Intelligence in education

Recently, our NZ Sales Director, Tony Gilbert led a webinar exploring into the evolving landscape of education and leadership in relation to AI’s transformative potential.

Tony discussed AI’s role in various tasks, including content creation through tools like ChatGPT, and emphasised the significance of authenticity in the learning process.

He talked about skills that remain distinctly human, and how AI’s influence extends to assessments, curriculum adjustments, and shifts in career trajectories. Tony also highlighted the necessity for transparency, security, and benchmarks when integrating AI into these areas.

In this blog post we will present what was covered during the webinar.

Use cases for Artificial Intelligence in schools

Artificial Intelligence (AI) profoundly impacts modern technology solutions, setting the stage for organisations to achieve a higher level of digital maturity. The scope of AI goes beyond simulating human intelligence across various functions, such as decision-making, knowledge retrieval, reasoning, and problem-solving, to name a few.

The capabilities of AI can be leveraged in School systems by enriching the learning processes and other associated functions. An additional focus will be on essential observations and thoughts for the senior leaders in the schooling system, along with a few AI usage suggestions.

With AI, schools can enrich their existing learning curriculum, create presentations, illustrations, and summaries, generate and evaluate assessments, tutor students virtually, and extend the capabilities of conventional teaching processes.

AI uses Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing to create digital assets with a few manual instructions. Data mining is one feature of AI that ensures the curriculum includes the latest standards by crawling across various online sources and generating value-driven output.

Guidelines for better adoption to AI technology

Here are a few guidelines for senior leaders looking to implement AI in their schooling system:

Basic understanding: Getting a basic understanding of Generative Artificial Intelligence is a significant factor that a leadership team needs to implement. You need to know where AI can fit into the big picture and understand its capabilities and drawbacks. AI can replace or complement human intelligence, a vital distinction you need to be aware of.

Communication: Reaching out to your teaching, student, and parent community is another essential aspect that needs attention. There is a need to discuss the potential ways to use AI and drive a consensus on implementation. You need to educate the broader community on ways to protect identity and associated sensitive information from being posted publicly, which can have severe repercussions if misused or hacked, such as impersonation. Seek ideas by setting up a course, a discussion group, or an internal club for effective communication and knowledge sharing. Such an exercise will address challenges people have with using AI, such as data security, privacy issues, or being a replacement for manual resources. Being transparent and setting realistic expectations is crucial to AI implementation in the schooling system.

Regulatory compliance: The creation, storage, and transmission of AI-generated data are subject to diverse regulations, which are geo-specific across various nations. You must ensure complete adherence to prevalent norms specific to your location.

Ensure the safety of your school network: Implement advanced security features such as Two-factor authentication and regulated use of VPNs, amongst others. You need a system that ensures complete control over your digital infrastructure by creating the proper set of administrators, conducting regular safety drills, and making cybersecurity training a continuous process.

Effective change management process: This is key to a successful AI adoption in school systems. It would be best to educate end-users on the changes in the current system that will affect how they work. Do have engaging discussions with your staff on potential career pathways that they can expect from an AI implementation.

Setting benchmarks: Set benchmarks on the usage of AI and its expected result and adoption. As a leader, you need to understand the limitations of AI and the fact that human involvement and relations are irreplaceable. Benchmarks will help you regulate and optimise your AI adoption efforts and ensure seamless integration with your end-users.

Open AI: This powers many AI-driven tools such as ChatGPT, that now has an enterprise version that offers an enhanced layer of security for your data. You can regulate data access, sharing, storage, and ownership. Do consider paid subscription models, as they come with better security features when compared to Open-Source offerings.

With the above factors, you need to have a strategy on what to embrace by using AI, understand the decisions it will influence, and create a mechanism to track progress. You also need to factor in the significance of authenticity in the learning process and clearly distinguish between AI-powered and manual tasks.

Watch the webinar

Want to recap the entire discussion? Watch the webinar on our YouTube Channel.