As a new force of technological revolution, ARTIFICIAL intelligence has penetrated into all walks of life. Disruption and innovation are common, but the combination of artificial intelligence and education has been tepid, which seems to confirm Jobs’ concern many years ago that technology can empower education, which looks easy, but actually it is difficult.
【1】 Education is cognition
New technology, especially artificial intelligence technology, which is a symbol of the trend of The Times, has achieved remarkable results in reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The expected huge returns encourage people to invest in this upgrade campaign, so that everything in the world can be artificial intelligence.
While the development of AI+ finance, manufacturing and medical care has shown initial results, AI+ education is moving slowly. We can’t help but wonder what went wrong and why education, the big brother, has failed to advance.
In essence, the logic of education and technology is different.
The pursuit of technology changes with each passing day, while education stresses the inheritance of classics. The technology of decades ago may have been eliminated long ago, but the moral teachings of thousands of years ago are still influencing and constraining us.
Instead of focusing on technology in the objective world, education is always centered on people. The complexity of people itself determines the complexity of the education system.
So far, there are still many mysteries about the workings of the human brain and the evolution of the mind, and the education of soul cultivation, such as how people internalize knowledge and interact with others for inspiration, is also full of unknown colors.
In the face of such a large and rich education system, it is difficult for any technology that attempts to turn itself against the dominant position to intervene. Only by clearly adjusting its position and deeply recognizing the purpose and mission of education can it become a partner of education, rather than a conqueror.
Therefore, different from other industries, AI+ education is not about productivity liberation, but about cognitive revolution, about how people shape their own personality and how they face the world.
This process is not bound to be radical. Education with the help of AI is still silent. From this perspective, questions about the development of AI+ education in recent years seem to be clearer.
[2] AI+ the reality of education
However, there are still many players who grasp the nettle and even regard education as an eternal industry. In their opinion, no matter when and where, the education industry has an inexhaustible market and students. Just as the outbreak of the epidemic last year opened a window of opportunity.
As you can see, since the epidemic, online education advertising is overwhelming, ape tutoring, homework help, learn with who and other educational institutions ushered in the flow feast, but also by the crazy chasing capital investment.
Among them, many institutions are selling AI, such as zebra AI class and fish AI class, attracting many families yearning for new technology.
Such ai-focused courses are mostly seen in the primary school age group. They claim that through AI interactive classes and professional teachers’ whole-course guidance, they can enhance the interest of education and greatly improve the teaching effect.
However, many families after the real experience, and the imagination of intelligent personalized education, it seems not the same.
Indeed, we have to admit the fact that the current development level of AI+ education is still in the initial stage without the flashy packaging of marketing, and the participation of ARTIFICIAL intelligence in teaching activities mostly plays a supporting role.
Surrounded by these lofty propaganda, we should be more aware of the real situation of this industry, and how much the gap between reality and imagination.
[3] Four landing scenes
After all, what exactly is “AI+ education”? According to the common definition, it is the deep integration of education and artificial intelligence, and with the help of the technology and application of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, comprehensively improve the fairness, quality and individuality of education, and ultimately realize the growth and development of people.
According to different teaching processes, the application scenarios of AI+ education can also be divided into teaching, learning, management and examination. At present, ALL AI applications have been implemented.
Specifically, including “teaching” related intelligent teaching assistant, intelligent correction, learning situation analysis, VR teaching, etc.; Related to “learning”, such as taking photos and searching questions, adaptive learning and educational robots; Smart campus, intelligent curriculum arrangement and decision support related to “management”; Related to “examination” machine marking, oral evaluation, test paper analysis, etc.
Among them, thanks to the maturity of voice recognition and image recognition technology in recent years, artificial intelligence has a high penetration degree and a good market response for scenes such as oral evaluation, intelligent correction and photo searching, but there are also some limitations.
For example, the application of oral assessment, although good in reading and retelling, can be used in free expression and other situations that need to be adapted, but the current ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology is difficult to deal with.
However, the application of photo searching has much lower technical requirements. In order to create barriers to competition, players have begun to shift the battlefield, from tool drainage to content value-added and course services.
The deep learning technology that supports product iteration has been upgraded from image recognition and content retrieval to data mining and expression recognition.
Through observation, it can be found that the penetration degree of ARTIFICIAL intelligence is high, mainly concentrated in the peripheral links of teaching, including assessment and practice before and after class.
However, the core links of teaching are often of low penetration and the most difficult for intelligentization, such as artificial intelligence adaptive learning and AI classroom.
As we all know, the basis of artificial intelligence technology is data. Only with enough effective data can accurate algorithm model be constructed and then applied to the actual scene.
However, the difficulty of AI+ education is that it is extremely difficult to obtain the data of the teaching process. No matter the process of students absorbing knowledge or the process of interacting with teachers, they are filled with a lot of unstructured data.
In order to realize adaptive learning, that is, large-scale teaching in accordance with their aptitude and personalized teaching, artificial intelligence technology must be upgraded, which is also the core path of AI+ education development in the future.
[4] Industry development at home and abroad
On the whole, the AI+ education industry has been accelerating up to now, thanks to not only technological progress, but also policy encouragement and capital support.
In recent years, the next game players, the existing online and offline education institutions, but also education information manufacturers, technology suppliers, Internet giants, the former is closer to the scene and users, the latter has more technological advantages.
Looking at the global AI+ education industry, China and the United States are far ahead in terms of emphasis on education level, AI technology development level and policy support, ranking among the countries that are relatively leading in AI+ education.
Research shows that China and the US have different priorities in AI+ education development due to different national conditions and academic conditions.
The top three trends of AI education enterprises in the United States are adaptive learning, language learning related, pre-service and vocational education, while the top three trends in China are language learning related, adaptive learning, and virtual teachers.
As can be seen from the ranking, adaptive learning, as the development goal of AI+ education, has achieved a more mature development in the United States, while vocational education, as a key investment field in the United States, although it has a small market in China, it may have great potential in the future.
According to statistics, there are about thousands of enterprises in AI+ education business around the world. The author selected one in China and the United States as the representative enterprises with outstanding performance in the track, so as to have an in-depth understanding of them.
All ai learners have probably heard of Coursera, a major OPEN course website in the United States, which is founded by Professor Andrew Ng’s machine learning course.
Coursera, which has seen rapid user growth in the wake of this year’s pandemic, is expected to have its first IPO in 2021 at a valuation of $5 billion.
In addition to the c-terminal, Coursera’s B-terminal business, which is seen as a major revenue driver in the future, utilizes data from its vast library of learners and content to train relevant models and develop a talent evaluation system to help more than 2,000 clients customize online courses efficiently.
Coursera is the epitome of the booming development of vocational education in the United States. China, which attaches great importance to exam-oriented education, has also emerged a number of leading enterprises on the K12 education track, such as Squirrel AI.
Squirrel AI, founded in 2014, is one of the first educational institutions in China to provide AI adaptive learning solutions and services for K12 students. It has deep cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University and Chinese Academy of Sciences. After years of technical research and development, squirrel AI has established a unique advanced AI learning engine.
The learning engine tracks the learning process of students through multi-dimensional tracking, pushes learning content and learning path to thousands of people, helps students grasp the appropriate learning pace, and gives in-depth effect evaluation.
Different from the enlightenment AI courses mentioned above, squirrel AI is closer to the core of AI+ education development system. Although the self-adaptive learning system currently developed has relatively simple functions, the cross-domain of this step is worth looking forward to.
[5] Future, collaboration
Finally, no matter how artificial intelligence technology develops, the essence of education will not change, which is to awaken and inspire. What technology can do is to assist teachers and help teaching, so that every child can get appropriate education.
In the future, as AI+ education turns from virtual to real, I believe that the real thousands of faces will eventually come true.
The starting platform | public [AI] soy sauce king, prohibiting reproduced without permission