Education, Technology

Artificial Intelligence for Smart Content Creation in Education

March 10, 2022

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Before we dive into the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education, let’s define what AI is. Artificial intelligence is the study of intelligent agents – systems that perceive their environment and take actions that maximize the chance of achieving a goal.

We often read in the media that artificial intelligence will one day replace us. We believe that AI will elevate us, not replace us. The reason is that artificial intelligence doesn’t work as well for higher-order tasks such as complex decision-making and creativity. We believe that AI will be supporting us in specialized, clear defined use cases that are repetitive, not safety-critical and where a lot of data is available to train the machine learning algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence in Education

Let’s have a look at two different players in education, teachers and students, and how artificial intelligence can affect their lives.

Teachers can benefit from AI by automating repetitive pedagogical tasks. For example, creating multiple versions of the same test, grading tests, and providing feedback to students or analyzing the performance of individual students, or of a class as a whole. This frees up time for teachers for more complex pedagogical tasks like a critical debate in class or collaborative projects.

Students can profit from a more personalized learning trajectory depending on their prior performances and special needs. AI can also improve communication between teachers and students. This allows the latter to receive instant feedback on their exercises and assignments.¹

With that said, let’s look at a few examples of AI in education.

Personalized learning

As each student is different and has a different learning pace, personalized learning aims to tailor learning to each student’s strengths, and skills. This can be achieved for example by one-on-one tutoring, but this might be expensive and often time-consuming. With the help of AI, a personalized learning trajectory can be created for each student that automatically collects feedback, adjusts, and recommends the best possible next learning step.²

Example of a personalized learning tool: Duolingo

One example of personalized learning is Duolingo. Duolingo is a language-learning platform where you can learn more than 30 languages online with bite-size lessons. Duolingo’s lessons are tailored to help each student learn at the right level and pace. To analyze each students learning process and help them practice their weak spots Duolingo uses artificial intelligence and language science.³

Artificial Intelligence - Personalized Learning in Education — Personalized learning with Duolingo⁴

Smart feedback

Smart feedback can support teachers and students by analyzing and scoring essays as well as analyzing writing and giving feedback. Another part of smart feedback is authorship verification. Here the software scans writings and/or essays for plagiarism to promote academic integrity.

Example of a smart feedback tool: Grammarly

Who hasn’t heard of Grammarly? With Grammarly’s AI-powered software you receive suggestions on your writings to make them bold, clear, and mistake-free. Grammarly uses machine learning and natural language processing to improve your writing and give you smart feedback.⁵

Artificial Intelligence - Smart Feedback in Education — Grammarly Writing Assistant⁶

Universal access

Universal access is a powerful tool to accommodate all students no matter their impairments, languages, or location. It can help students that might have visual/hearing or other impairments and fittingly provide content. Universal access also translates and delivers content in multiple languages to create a “global” classroom. This also offers remote learning opportunities for students that can’t attend in person.⁷

Smart content creation

Teachers often spend hours preparing exercises and formative assessments for their students. Artificial intelligence can support them by creating smart content. With the help of AI, different content types can be generated for the classroom like study guides, and exercises.

How Smartest Learning enables smart content creation

At Smartest Learning we are using smart content creation to make the tedious task of exercise creation easier for teachers and students. To create interactive exercises in seconds we are mainly using two technologies, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Computer vision helps us to extract content from study documents and analyze if this content is text, images, or tables. Once the software has detected the content of the document, we use Natural Language Processing to generate questions.

Let’s look at different exercise types that we can create at Smartest using AI.

Exercises we can create with artificial intelligence are on the one hand fact-based exercises. We can create these semantic exercises in different formats like multiple-choice, true/ false, fill the gaps as well as flashcards with definitions. To do that we are using Natural Language Processing. The algorithm first analyses the content for the key information, selects answers, and then generates false options as distractors.

Artificial Intelligence - Smart Content Creation n Education at Smartest Learning — Automatically creating semantic questions out of a text document

We also offer a series of language learning exercises where the focus is on learning vocabulary and grammar. These exercises can also be created in different formats like flashcards, fill the gaps and crossword puzzles.

At Smartest we are also able to use images for exercise creation. With the help of Computer Vision, we can detect text blocks on a labeled image and turn the image into an interactive diagram exercise.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence holds great potential in Education. We believe that AI can elevate teachers but not replace them. It can also empower students to explore and learn at their own pace. As described, there are already many great tools like Duolingo and Grammarly that leverage artificial intelligence to support teaching and learning and we want to also contribute to this with our learning tool Smartest.

This blog article was written in connection with the Eduhub webinar on March 3, 2022. Nikola, our NLP Expert, gave a presentation on Artificial Intelligence for smart content creation in Education. You can watch the whole webinar here on Switch.