Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already rapidly changing the education landscape. ​​The tool, from Open AI, lets you type questions using spoken language. The chatbot incorporated into Open AI, gives conversational answers. Educators have been asking the AI tool to write student reports, emails to staff and plan lessons.

While there was much debate online, there is no getting away from the fact that AI is going to influence the role of educators from now on. There are some potentially, innovative opportunities on the educational horizon.

Teaching is a vocational profession. But the work-load issue is taking teachers away from their main role as educators. Teachers have become content creators - spending far too long on generating reports, writing feedback, creating presentations and resources. AI could remove, or support much of this creation, allowing teachers to focus on curating and delivering content in a personalised way to their students.

Understanding the role of AI. What can't AI do?

Before we look at what AI can do, it is important to consider what AI can't do to give ourselves a healthy reminder of the important human-teaching roles that teachers play in the classroom, guiding young children/people.
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Inability to apply common sense: AI will not notice when a child has had a bad morning and just needs some emotional support before tackling that long division lesson. AI systems lack the ability to understand and apply common sense reasoning, making it difficult for them to make decisions in real-world situations that require human-like intuition and interpersonal skills.

No understanding of cause and effect: Teachers, unlike AI, have causal understanding. This is an aspect of teaching that we focus on at Kids Learn Fast. Where AI may pick up that a child performs better in the morning than in the afternoon, it will fail to understand the reasons for this. AI systems do not have the capability to understand the cause and effect relationships between events, making it challenging for them to make predictions or decisions based on complex scenarios.

Lacking creativity: AI systems are not capable of producing original and creative ideas, as they can only perform tasks based on the data and algorithms they have been trained on. This means that encouraging new ideas and drawing out thoughts from students will remain teacher driven.

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Creativity, causal understanding and common sense are just some of the human aspects that teachers bring to a classroom. So what can AI contribute and how is it going to allow us teachers to get on with being human ?