Our New Alpha Bet
AI is now being developed to hyper-personalize the learning experiences we're buying for ourselves and our kids. Will it make us—and them—smarter?
Generation Alpha—kids born after 2010, and the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century—are now serving as beta testers in hundreds of schools here and abroad to see if personalized, AI-powered tutors can revolutionize the way teachers work and how students learn, to achieve better outcomes. How goes the experiment?
NEW YORK—Things have changed a lot since Jim Jennings was in school.
“It was mostly just books, and more books, and I’m sure in the classroom, there was this old projector but mainly a big chalkboard,” Jennings, a fellow teacher, shared over lunch the other day. More recently, several Columbia University colleagues of mine also weighed in, recalling that when they were in school, they had to go to separate computer rooms down the hall to find or use any kind of tech. Jennings said he remembers high school classes in which interactive whiteboards were sometimes used but largely ignored. “A lot of teachers back then weren’t even comfortable using them, either, so they did not,” he laughed. "We've come a long way."
Indeed, many of us are now responsible for creating education designed for the future of work. Jim now does some work for Education In The 21st Century, a trust by the same name in the Southeast of England, which runs classes for 6,000 GEN Alpha students in 8 schools—in which half of the kids are aged between 4 and 11 years, and the other half, between 12 and 18. I teach emerging media and change management to graduate students, the youngest in their mid-20s.
Education, as a sector, has always been slower than others to adopt new technologies, but when the COVID pandemic closed schools here and abroad, Jim’s students, like mine and millions of others around the world—were all forced to take their classes online. That shift created a surge in demand by schools and universities for digital learning maps and ZOOM accounts—a spike that faded a bit after people returned to their on-site classrooms. “Despite their best of intentions,” said Mario Barosevcic, a partner at the edtech venture capital firm Emerge Capital, “schools have been laggards in adopting new technologies—at least some of them—because many of them still don't have the basics in place, like reliable wi-fi and other infrastructure requirements.”
But now? With all of today’s continuing excitement over generative AI—so-called “edtech" innovators are taking another shot at piloting new platforms and AI agents to revolutionize the classroom. But can they truly succeed at bringing all schools into the digital age?
Says Maxine Driscoll at the Trust: “Absolutely, that is the hope and the possibility is there.” She acknowledges that AI is still in the development phase, and school administrators, parents and policy makers will have a say in things when it’s launched into wider use, but there is growing belief within the education sector that this shift could represent some good news for teachers and students, alike. “Instead of struggling to give students all the information they need to succeed in areas many teachers might know little about,” Driscoll says, “giving their students access to AI designed specifically for their classrooms can help teachers to make learning less top-down and more participatory.” It would also help them to better prepare students to think critically and more creatively, she says, “and to go beyond their parents and teachers to make sure they have the skills to do it and keep helping them along the way as they build the confidence they need to achieve.”
Put simply, Jennings says: “AI capabilities can help us, for example, to understand exactly where each student might be getting stuck, and then help those individual students to more effectively understand something and then move on. That alone would help to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of education globally."
Pilot Programs
Hundreds of edtech companies are now working to help the education sector turn those hopes into realities by developing and testing different types of AI-powered tutors. Here are three of the most notable for their depth, reach and programming:
Khanmigo. This is an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence and developed by well-known educator Sal Kahn, the creator of the nonprofit Khan Academy. He has teamed up with Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT, to create learning applications for the technology. Khan, like a lot of educators, was concerned that ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI would encourage students to cheat by using it to do their classwork for them. But Kahn also saw how generative AI could be designed specifically for classroom use, with “guardrails” limiting its role to being a guide and tutor rather than a content creator. Khanmigo is now being tested in 266 school districts in the U.S.—and hundreds abroad—and specifically for students in grades 3 through 12. The program helps teachers to highly customize learning for individual students, track where each student might be getting stuck on assignments and better meet their diverse needs more accurately. In a recent TED talk, which has received 3.4 million views, Khan provided a popular demo of the AI tutor, which he says “makes students think by using a Socratic method. It doesn’t just give students the answers.” [Watch it here.] Khan says the technology could, one day, revolutionize the way teachers work and students learn—but he also acknowledges the AI tutor may need a year or two more in development to ensure privacy and security is sufficiently built into the system in a way that can scale.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest public school district in the United States, there’s Ed—an AI-powered learning platform that includes a chatbot represented by a small illustration of a smiling sun. It’s another kind of AI tutor, but this one focuses especially on the needs of children with developmental disabilities and those working through mental health challenges. Ed is being tested in 100 schools within the LA district and is accessible at all hours by parents and students through a website. It can answer questions about a a child’s classroom, his or her current coursework, help individual students with a lesson and provide access to information about the student’s grades and attendance—and also point users to optional activities. So far, says Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, students like it, especially when Ed awards students with gold stars for completing exercises. “AI is here to stay,” he says. Carvalho says the district will be conducting a formal survey of students this spring to get their input on the program “to keep meeting student needs.” But “so far, so good,” he added. “…If you don’t master AI, it will master you.”
The Unbound Academy, a charter school based in Atlanta with satellite schools in Arizona, Texas and Florida, recently received approval from the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools to start piloting a fully online, AI-powered “school experience” in Phoenix for students in grades 4 through 8. The new program is designed to give students just two hours of supervised, AI-powered academic instruction per day—followed by in-person workshops in financial literacy, entrepreneurship, critical thinking and public speaking for the rest of the school day. The programs will rely on AI platforms, including some offered by Khan Academy. “We think it will make students happier and smarter and give them more time to explore life skills and passions,” said founder Alaina Chipman-Leeks. Depending on student performance, the AI program will help teachers adapt the program’s difficulty and subject matter interest to meet individual student needs. “This might mean slowing down and spending more time on some subjects, or upping the ante and making some parts of the education plan more difficult,” she said. Unbound Academy also runs private schools in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha Schools.
What’s next?
“When we see how AI tutors work, for the first time, at first it feels like we’re in a sci-fi film,” Khan says. “But once this is understood, it will become clear that human teachers will always be needed” to help learning, itself, evolve with the new technologies being developed locally, nationally and globally.
Khan says the AI tutors aren’t designed to replace humans in the classroom. “This is about using AI as personalized teaching assistants and tutors personalized to each student, to amplify what human teachers and students do best—and enable teachers, working with the data the AI tutors are gathering, to spend more time with individual students and help them figure more things out in real time.”
Adds Emerge’s VC executive Mario Barosevcic: “Unlike what you might often read about with catchy titles, I don’t think the future is going to be about every kid wearing a VR headset and exploring the metaverse all day, or every kid sitting patiently at a table, staring at their tablets the whole day in class while receiving infinitely personalized knowledge. I also don’t think teachers are going to be replaced by AI robo-teachers. In the classroom, teachers will continue to play a key role in motivating, mentoring, parenting, conflict-resolving and guiding students—but now while having more insight into what each student needs and the ability, then, to help them in more individualized ways than ever before. We see this as a win-win.”
Students will likely be the best ones to let us know how well it’s working.
Stay tuned.
What’s your take on the concept of using AI tutors in the classroom? Comment here to let us know your thoughts!
Thanks, Charles, for sharing your take on the concept of using AI tutors. AI, like any technology, can be a double-edged sword. Let's hope it will never diminish nor replace the importance of personal relationships.
Not in K-12 and not in higher education either. Personal Relationships between
Teachers & Children, to include young adults and older elder students is key to
Meaningful Learning & Critical Thinking!
AI is an unknown benefit or disaster;
Use it to Search Outer Space, WITH unmanned vehicles where the harsh environment ismostdeadly4humans
Use it in medicine and healthcare
Science after it has been determined
As A benefit, rather then a disaster!!!!