New Zealand firms say AI will not replace human teachers, but it is a valuable tool. Photo: 123RF/Alexander Limbach
Two years after ChatGPT was launched to the public, AI-driven applications that provide feedback on students' answers are becoming a go-to application for education technology companies.
New Zealand firms say AI will not replace human teachers, but it is a valuable tool.
LearnCoach has been offering video tutorials to help teens prepare for their NCEA exams for years.
The company's founder Dave Cameron said just over a year ago it introduced AI-driven tutorials, and they had left the videos for dead with more than one million sessions this year alone.
"There's still videos... but by far the most popular thing is the AI tutoring sessions. So a student would come on now, same problem - 'I'm at home. I have no idea what to do. I've got a test coming up' - and it'll figure out how much you know and teach you the stuff you don't know. It'll help you combine different ideas to be able to write a proper paragraph. And it'll give a whole bunch of feedback," he said.
But there was still nothing like a good human teacher, Cameron said.
"If you think of your favourite subject at school, it was probably because you had a favourite teacher. So that kind of relational human aspect is still incredibly important to get students to show up, to motivate them, to place expectations.
"That human aspect is by far the best when done well, but I think that if you can't have that, if you're in class and you're teacher's busy with somebody else, if you're at home and don't know what to do, then AI tutoring is absolutely so much better than nothing. It's definitely the next best thing. It used to be video that was the next best thing... but AI's blitzed that."
Another Kiwi ed-tech company, Education Perfect, was in the process of adding an AI function to its software to give students instant feedback on their answers.
One of the company's founders, Shane Smith, said testing had shown the application helped students improve their answers and that students enjoyed using it.
Studies showed AI could help raise achievement, but also that it could lead to worse outcomes if it did too much for students, he said.
"One of the risks of the AI systems is if they aren't set up in an appropriate educational way, then they tend to be too helpful."
"They tend to immediately help the student to go straight to a perfect answer and in doing so, that can actually remove an opportunity for that productive struggle," he said.
AI would have a huge impact on schools, but mostly as a background tool that would improve rather than replace classroom learning, Smith said.
"That impact is going to happen in a whole bunch of little pieces. So we're going to get hopefully a whole lot of small improved educational experiences like this. I don't see AI as necessarily completely changing what a classroom looks like. I think what we're going to see is an augmentation.
"I see this as almost an underlying, base technology. At the moment when people think AI they see chatbots. I actually think that more and more we're going to see it integrated into the deeper, underlying layers of software. It's just going to enable us to do things that were previously very difficult or very time-consuming."
Another Kiwi ed-tech company co-founder, Hengjie Wang from Kami, said AI could save teachers time and improve students' learning experience.
He said if teachers used AI to do the "heavy lifting", they could spend more of their time interacting with their students.
"The more we explore and implement AI into the classroom, the more they're going to realise those time savings," he said.
Wang said one of the ways Kami used AI was to give teachers the ability to summarise and generate questions from curriculum material, check students' answers to those questions and provide them with feedback.
He said the company gave schools the option of enabling or disabling the AI components of its software and most were happy to use it.
Wang said using chatbots as AI tutors "might not necessarily be the most instructionally-responsible thing to do."
Rather, he expected students would use AI to find the most relevant sources of information or even to summarise those sources or give students feedback on their own summaries of the sources.
"I think there is always going to be a place for a teacher in the classroom to be that guide of that learning experience," he said.
Albany Senior High School principal Claire Amos said technology companies were offering schools a lot more products that were AI-enhanced, but were not yet truly transformational.
The "real wins" of the technology to date included increasing teachers' productivity and potentially providing a teaching assistant for every student in a class, she said.
"If we know all students have access to appropriate technology and we fund some of those fantastic AI tutors that already exist then we could ensure students not only had the teacher in front of them for support, but they may also have their own personalised AI tutor. That technology already exists," she said.
Amos said schools and their students could miss out if they did not have the money to ensure every student had access to their own computer or if their policies discouraged or blocked the use of AI tools.
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