Why is AI good for education?

The thought of AI in schools often generates hysterical headlines. People worry about their children being taught by robots or ChatGPT writing plagiarized essays. However, the reality of AI in education is far from these worst-case scenarios.

AI is revolutionizing modern education in positive ways. Through AI, you can personalize learning to suit each student, pinpoint when students could use help nurturing burgeoning skills, let students have virtual educational experiences they couldn’t access in real life, and more.

5 advantages of AI in education for students and teachers

AI tools for education have many advantages for students. Here are just a few:

1) Simulating real-world experiences

AR (Augmented Reality) is already being used in several educational capacities. For example, it can put apprentices into a simulated work environment and let them safely familiarize themselves with the tools and controls they’ll be using in later employment.

With the addition of AI, the possibilities for rich educational experiences become almost limitless. Students could watch a play at Shakespeare’s Globe, as authentic and spontaneous as the real thing, without ever leaving their classrooms.

They could also learn languages through naturalistic conversations in the target language with an AI, perhaps even in an authentically simulated environment like a shop or airport. 

2) Personalization of the learning journey

Students at every stage of education have different learning styles, skills, passions, and backgrounds. Some students thrive on traditional process-based learning, while others benefit from a more hands-on approach.

Today, traditional education focuses more on what the teacher can provide to the class as a whole rather than what will benefit the individual student, resulting in a "one-size-fits-all" system that fits no one in particular.

All of this is changing with the help of AI. While the teachers still set the class agenda, and hopefully always will, the AI tools can help by quickly analyzing each student’s learning patterns, spot what’s working and what isn’t, and signal when extra support is needed. AI tools can suggest and deliver personalized learning programs tailored to each student's precise strengths and needs.

3) Quick personalized attention

Ever sat for ages with your hand up in a classroom, waiting for the teacher to get around to helping you? This could be a thing of the past with AI teaching assistants.

Students lose huge amounts of learning time when they become "stuck" and have to wait for help. But AI can step in to help out with problems immediately. The student can quickly get back on track or escalate to the teacher (see point 5 for more ideas on how AI helps teachers). Less time is wasted, fewer students fall behind, and the teacher is better able to focus their time with AI teaching assistance.

4) Tutoring and learning centers

AI can bring all of these benefits and more to out-of-the-classroom learning situations, such as tutoring and virtual classrooms. If a child falls outside the classroom norm, either above or below,, or during snow days and school closures, students could still learn to a high standard.

Learning tools have become very sophisticated after the Covid-19 pandemic. Adding AI to your learning platform will help to make learning more intelligent, nuanced, personalized, and beneficial to the learners.

5) Assistance for teachers

Teachers are the most valuable resource available to students. Teacher performance has an enormous impact on student outcomes. But, teachers are under a lot of stress and pressure, with 59% of all teachers reporting frequent job-related stress.

Education AI tools for teachers could help to relieve some of that stress. AI can remove a substantial amount of admin and workload from teachers by taking on tasks like generating lesson plans and devising quizzes. This will not only put teachers in a better frame of mind to teach, it will also free them up to give more focus to their students.

Happier, less stressed teachers make for happier, more productive classrooms. So, AI assistance for teachers is perhaps one of the biggest reasons AI is good for education.

What are the most common AI tools for education?

Learning-management systems

AI-powered learning-management systems use AI to analyze student data, spot performance patterns, and provide valuable insights to enhance learning.

For example, LMS can suggest personalized learning paths for each student, flag up when a student needs extra support from teachers, highlight praise-worthy student achievements that may otherwise go unnoticed, and generally track student progress over time.

Virtual tutors

Virtual AI tutors provide personalized, human-style teaching and feedback for students. A good AI tutor can act as a digital mentor to students, picking up on performance patterns and teaching in ways designed to suit the individual student, all while maintaining a supportive persona that the student can relate to.

By deploying virtual tutors, educational establishments can ensure that each student receives the personal support and feedback they deserve without putting too much burden on human teachers.

Supplemental learning tools

Remote learning tools like Vonage APIs for education help students get the best possible classroom experience no matter where they are physically located. Supplemental learning tools may combine features like interactive video sessions, virtual tutors, virtual classroom environments, learning management tools, and more.

5 challenges and concerns surrounding AI solutions for education

AI is beneficial to education at all levels. But it’s important to remember that AI isn’t perfect. Some people have valid concerns about AI, and plenty of challenges are associated with implementing AI education successfully.

Here are some challenges and concerns to bear in mind when picking an AI educational solution:

1) Lack of accuracy

Some AI tools are more accurate than others. Accuracy is incredibly important in an educational setting, so make sure that you check how accurate each AI tool you’re interested in is.

It’s also worth establishing how your chosen AIs get the data they use to do their jobs. Data sources and gathering techniques greatly affect how accurate your AIs are. 

For example, if your AI pulls data from the wider internet, it’s vulnerable to misinformation. On the other hand, if it’s pulling data from a verified and well-respected data source (like a digitized library, for example), it’s likely to be more accurate.

2) Passing on bias

AIs operate by taking in and learning from data. Unfortunately, a lot of the data available to AIs is inherently biased. AIs are prone to taking in that biased data and treating it in an entirely context-free, uncritical manner, leading to bias being passed on in the AI’s output.

A 2024 UNESCO study revealed concerning levels of bias and regressive stereotyping in AI output. This is concerning, especially in an educational context. Educational AIs and their output must be carefully checked for bias before student use.

3) Cheating

As we covered above, students could use AI to make plagiarism harder to detect. There are also other ways that students can use AI to cheat. We’ll go into these in a bit more detail later.

4) Plagiarism

AI can be used to plagiarize, and can plagiarize itself. Unscrupulous students can use AI to rephrase plagiarized passages to avoid plagiarism filters. But that’s not all. As generative AI works by scraping creative data and reusing it to produce its output, many people consider anything "created" by Gen AI to be plagiarized. This is an ethical consideration that anyone considering using generative AI tools for education should be aware of.

5) Privacy and security

Student and teacher data is sensitive. Because educational AI relies on huge amounts of this data to properly do its job, institutions must pay close attention to data security and personal privacy.

Most common AI cheating methods

We mentioned AI-enabled cheating earlier. Here are a few of the most common cheating methods that use AI:

• AI translation. Using AI to cheat on language assignments via automatic translation.

• Assignment generation. Feeding essay or assignment questions to an AI and turning in the output as the student’s work.

• Rephrasing. AI is good at rephrasing passages copied from books or web pages. The student can use this to effectively plagiarise without getting caught.

• Real-time cheating. In an online exam situation, an AI assistant can easily feed answers and insights to students.

Educating students about AI

In addition to incorporating AI to optimize education, students must be educated about AI.

AI is likely to play an enormous role in the world of tomorrow. School students today will graduate into a world that heavily uses AI. So, the more they know about AI, the better prepared they will be for an AI-enhanced future.

Education in the age of AI has to teach students about everything to do with AI, from spotting AI-generated materials to detecting AI bias, using AI productively, and even building AI technologies.

How to choose AI applications for education

If you’re interested in using AI for education, you must pick the right tools and applications. Here are some things to think about when choosing AI tools for teachers and students:

Establish the specific needs of your students and teachers

Your AI's end goal must be to benefit teachers and students. If the AI you use isn’t enhancing both the teaching and learning experience and improving educational outcomes, why did you pick it?

Work out exactly what your teachers and students need from AI. For example, AI for higher education will have a different user base with different needs to those of elementary schools.

Consider what you need your AI tools to do, the subjects and disciplines they will cover, how you want them to benefit students and teachers, the range of people using them, and so on. Once you have a list of precisely what your AI’s users need and what you want your AI to do, you can narrow down your list of potential AI tools.

Think about ease of use

Many people will likely use your AI tools, so they must be user-friendly. Weigh up the potential usefulness of a tool against how long it will take to train staff and students to use it safely and effectively.

Remember, teachers, management, and supervisors need to be able to control these tools. It’s important that students can’t hack into or otherwise manipulate AI tools and use them to challenge educator authority. So you need AI that can easily be controlled by teachers and is impervious to manipulation. 

Consider integration with your existing tech stack

Finding a solution that works well with your existing tech stack is useful. For example, communications APIs that move easily from your email system to your virtual classroom, your databases, and more make for a much smoother experience than building workarounds between incompatible applications.

Check which applications, platforms, and systems potential AI tools work best before you opt for anything.

Check data privacy and security features

All data is sensitive, but educational data is particularly sensitive. This is especially true if your AI works with children.

Look for a solution that prioritizes data security and user privacy. For example, Vonage Video API takes security very seriously, with top-range security protocols built in at every stage and regular updates to ensure user safety and privacy. 

The future of AI for education

What does the future of AI in education look like? Here are some of the things we’re likely to see in the upcoming years:

• Enhanced teacher support. The roles of teachers will shift and become more student-focused as AI takes on more admin and planning tasks.

• Revolutionizing grading and assessment. AI has the potential to speed up grading and assessment, make it more accurate, and even transform it in unexpected ways. For example, AI can quickly analyze performance patterns and give granular, deeply personalized assessment feedback.

• Improved digital literacy. AI in education can help with digital literacy skills, which will, in turn, set students up for profitable futures in an increasingly digitized world.

• More personalized learning. AI allows us to provide every student with a personalized learning experience tailored to their needs.

• Higher quality user experiences. AI is capable of optimizing everything from video conferencing to exam grading. In addition to taking on many of these roles, AI can spot opportunities to upgrade and improve user experiences across your tech stack.

• More equitable learning experiences. Currently, some students get a lot more teacher attention and learning experiences than others. AI could close this gap, with virtual tutors giving extra support to quieter, higher-achieving students who may otherwise fly under the radar, and adding valuable extra context to difficult subjects.

Enhance learning and student interactions with generative AI for education

AI has incredible potential for education. AI features can make life easier for teachers and improve students' educational outcomes in many ways. AI can make education accessible for all, no matter where they are located or their particular needs.

With Vonage APIs for education, you can deliver safe and interactive video lessons and give students perfectly personalized learning experiences - all while taking pressure off human teachers. Speak with an expert about Vonage educational solutions today.