AI has the promise of leading the education sector in India. We have a young population with over 600 million in the learning age. Unfortunately, our education infrastructure is far from adequate in doing justice to this huge population.
Consequently, we stand at the juncture where our education renders only about 46% of our graduates employable (CII Report, 2019). The NITI Aayog Report on National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence has identified AI as a significant game-changer of the education sector.
The Government of India expects AI to address the following critical issues in our education system:
Prevention of drop-outs
Today although the Gross Enrolment Ratio has been stepped up, retention remains a major challenge. Drop-outs are attributed to multiple reasons – socio-financial situation, gender, age, teaching quality, student learning absorption, etc. It would have been practically impossible to follow each lead to identify the list of potential drop-outs. However, the Andhra Pradesh Government along with Microsoft AI-based solution has made it possible in Vishakhapatnam. And accordingly, the State Education Department is running intervention programs to help the students continue with their learning.
Rationalization of infrastructure
The reality in every class is that all students do not learn at par, and given our shortage of teachers, the right teacher-student ratios to personalize learning is not possible. Worse still, in rural areas, we do not have dedicated classrooms. Given the presence of heterogeneous students in the class, each demanding different levels of attention and learning paths, the teachers would be greatly benefited to have AI-based solutions. Further, AI-based administrative tools for teaching – right from School Management Systems, gradation assessments to course curriculum updates, would be most helpful.
Personalization of learning
Different individuals have different preferences for learning. Conventionally, we are used to the classroom style, and that too with a high degree of rote learning. This explains our poor performance on the employability front, as the application of learning has not been our forte! This shift could be made possible by AI. The additional advantage for the ones with a higher knowledge appetite is that they could learn more from the aggregated global curriculum. Simultaneously students with significant gaps could have interesting methods to revise learning in deficit areas.
“The market today is abuzz with few renowned AI start-ups catering to personalized learning. However, what most of them offer today is aggregated learning. The deep algorithms of modifying learning paths to customize to the student style are not yet existing in the popular solutions.”
Also, if we look at the size of the market and the actual coverage, we are still at a very nascent stage. Further, the footprint of AI is governed by return on investment. Consequently, most of the investment is focusing on the money-making segments in education, for example: catering to the entrance examinations for engineering and medical examinations. We are in dire need of sound funding to make the AI revolution in education happen. More corporate houses need to step into this space.
Yet another gap in our system is the lack of AI skills. Compared to other countries, Indian engineers are significantly lower in their AI skills. Consequently, we do not have many people working on the technical solutions who are actually aware of the problem complexities. To bridge this gap, in the recent past there have been a significant number of courses introduced in AI education. The emphasis lies on coding and not as much in the mathematical modeling or predictive statistics. Unless this gap is bridged, we would be churning our weak AI experts and not deep learners. This would impact the next wave of AI-based revolution in India.
Personally, I see a bigger potential in using AI than what we are talking about today. There are at least two other AI-based ramifications possible that would make our education system worthwhile and robust.
Career path orientation
Today we have a very broad learning coverage, with the forcing of learning of many subjects to start with and then specializing to the few that we gravitate towards. Unfortunately, not many students have the capability to take the grind of multiple subjects. AI-based learning could help in identifying the strengths early and help parents, teachers, and students make an informed decision of the curriculum to become career-ready.
Teachers’ facilitation guide
AI needs to help to make our teachers perform better. Under no circumstances, the role of the teacher would be undermined by AI. In fact, the human touch would be even more important to help students connect to knowledge. AI needs to be trained to give teachers feedback on their communication and connecting styles that would help them impress the students. From a student standpoint, all of us have had teachers as role models in our school days. It is important that we have Student Impression Scores as performance indicative metrics for teachers who are interested in truly making a difference to society through their noble profession.
While I am a proponent of AI-based education, few empirical doubts remain in my mind. And these are based on my personal experiences. Recently I had visited a school that we have adopted as part of our CSR initiative. The students were participating in a Science Exhibition and were expected to design science models explaining various scientific principles. The students expected some guidance from us. While explaining, some of us opened our smartphones. Their attention immediately switched to the internet, specifically youtube. We saw them frantically making notes of possible model making solutions.
We realized that most of them had limited access to the Internet, which explained the behavior. This experience left me wondering about a few fundamental questions on enabling AI-based education – do we have enough resources today to equip all our students with learning tablets. How do we ensure that this AI fed generation of students continues to think rather than relying on technology? How do we ensure that they stay focused on ‘relevant’ learning? It is very easy to get distracted in a maze of interesting topics! How do we ensure that they remain connected to people than just getting hooked to technology? Having raised these questions, I continue to stay optimistic about the potential of AI in Indian education.
The key to the future lies in the hands of the curious. AI is one of those magic potions that will make our nation educated and powerful.
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