Role of AI in higher education

Higher education has had lot of challenges over the years the more important being that the way higher education has been delivered over the past two centuries. 

Benjamin Franklin had once said that "an investment in education is the best investment ever possible"

While educators have been thinking deeply of how to reduce the costs for education, improving the delivery, whether one to one peer education or one to many classroom style, the costs can be very prohibitive. It can play a role in the modern day as the old one-to-many model, the challenges have been many, especially with the onset of numerous technology tools like e-learning and so on. The advent of AI chatbot, ChatGPT it is claimed will change the face of education and teaching like never before.

There are several ways that AI can help improve higher education:

1. Personalized learning: AI can help tailor course content and recommendations to individual students based on their strengths, weaknesses, and interests, providing a more personalized and effective learning experience.
2. Grading and feedback: AI can help grade assignments and provide feedback to students, freeing up teachers to focus on more high-level tasks such as providing one-on-one support to students and designing new courses.
3. Improving efficiency: AI can help streamline administrative tasks, such as managing course schedules and enrolments, allowing educators to focus on more high-impact activities.
4. Enhancing research: AI can help researchers analyze large datasets and identify patterns and trends, leading to new insights and discoveries.
5. Improving accessibility: AI can help make education more accessible to students with disabilities, by providing tools such as text-to-speech and translation capabilities.
6. Course design: AI can be used to design and optimize courses, including selecting relevant materials and creating personalized study plans for students.
7. Tutoring and support: AI can be used to provide 24/7 support for students, including answering questions and offering guidance.
8. Adaptive testing: AI can create personalized tests for students, adjusting the difficulty of questions based on their responses.
9. Automated grading: AI can grade assignments and exams, providing instant feedback to students and freeing up teachers' time for other tasks.
10. Virtual tutoring: AI can provide one-on-one tutoring to students through virtual assistants or chatbots.
11. Content creation: AI can be used to create personalized learning materials, such as customized lesson plans or learning modules.
12. Plan and deliver effective quizzes / feedback systems : students are more committed and engaged if they get to know their progress in almost real-time. AI systems can help in that.
13. Predictive analysis: AI can be used to analyze student data and predict academic performance, which can help educators identify students who may be at risk of falling behind and intervene early
14. Create personalised learning experiences that could remove the challenge of disengagement that is happening with some of the students. (click here for HBR 2019 article)
15. Making education affordable : Many aspiring students have to discontinue higher studies due to the exhorbitant costs. AI can democratise and make economical higher education for the masses.
16. Handle student queries more effectively and personally helping them make decisions to join Universities quicker and efficient
17. Engagement and commitment : While in the University chatbots for academics and other extra curricular activities can enable students to be more enagaged and committed to their career 

Overall, AI has the potential to personalise and revolutionize the way we think about and deliver education, making it more personalized, efficient, and effective.

For students sharing of personal data with different sites on the Internet can have a great liability into the future and can disincentivise students from sharing their data. Sites like mydata.org can help students to discern with which sites they can share or not. 

Recently, the AI based chatbot at the University of Murcia in Spain has been able to handle almost 39,000 queries from prospective admission seekers of the facilities and teaching learning experience for the students with almost 91% correctness.

While we may be aware of the benefits of AI in higher education in the modern context, there are challenges too that need to be handled with great caution. 

• high cost, 
• compromising privacy (fear of losing control over personal data), 
• lack of understanding for some, 
• fear of bias, 
• fear of unemployment due to automation, 
• issues with the seamless integration with existing educational practices and systems are challenges that  higher education systems across the world can face.

George.. (A big thanks to OpenAI, some of the inputs of this blog have been adapted from ChatGPT)