AI In Education Excerpt 1: AI As a Learning Aid
This article is the first in a series about AI and education by Andrew Rosston. Future excerpts will include discussion of plagiarism prevention and safe AI usage.
Teachers and professors often include links to supplemental learning materials to students for use outside of class. Websites like Khan Academy have become key resources for additional instruction for K-12 students, especially for more difficult subjects. Hearing the eponymous Sal Khan explain mathematical principles is excellent for students as a review tool and provides the benefit of hearing a second voice and teaching style explain concepts which have already been explained by another teacher. Others receive the same benefit from YouTube explanations of math and science, or from writing handbooks and encyclopedias, when paired with primary instruction in class.
Large language models, or LLMs, extend this concept further, allowing a secondary “teacher” to explain concepts in multiple styles at a student’s command and immediately answer questions, even outside of class time.
Being aware of how students can ask AI for examples of work and explanations of the principles behind them is important for educators, as some students are likely to use these tools at home if not in the classroom. Teachers should make sure that students understand not only the benefits of such tools but also a clear line between learning aids and plagiarized AI-produced work, just as they would when asking a parent for help on an assignment.
Students who have AI walk through a problem, only to copy down the work and forget the process will suffer, while those who use AI and other materials to further their own learning will likely succeed. Both teachers and parents need to help students understand such boundaries, as they had to with earlier internet resources and calculators.
In addition to explaining topics in various styles, LLMs can be used to research topics in record time and produce material from multiple perspectives. AI-supported search engines can pull information from multiple sites into a summary, showing which are most relevant to a query. Platforms like Perplexity AI and ChatGPT can follow multiple successive questions to refine their answers.
An AI can be instructed to discuss or explain a topic from the perspective of a college professor, a foreigner, or a fellow student. When brainstorming or attempting to understand multiple perspectives on an issue, this may be a great benefit to a student, though it will never truly replicate the real diversity of perspectives obtained from interviewing people. Answers are limited by the information available to the AI program and its training biases, which may make it difficult to generate balanced views or access information that is less prominently valued in its training.
For initial research and finding sources, AI can be extremely useful, and many search engines have implemented AI summaries already. For teachers looking for material to cover in a lesson or finding sources for student research, this is an excellent tool, especially when paired with independent searches for sources through library databases and standard search engines.
Services like Perplexity AI and many standard search engines that list the sources used in their AI summaries may be best for training students to review the legitimacy of information and delve deeper into subtopics for research. The team behind ChatGPT appears to be improving its ability to cite sources as well, demonstrating a positive trend toward reproducible research.
Information extraction and summarization by AI, both attached to search engines and potentially to various databases, is likely to remain a key tool in accessing sources, as contrasted to more speculative uses.
Despite continuing reliability issues, AI is a promising learning aid that can ease access to information for students around the world. So long as careful and honest use is made of such tools, they are likely to improve education for students who may grow up with AI as a normal part of life.
Andrew Rosston is a Business Analyst at OnlyMoso USA. He holds a B.A. in Business and Managerial Economics from Oregon State University.
