Over the past year, an ever-growing number of academic knowledge companies have been approaching universities with innovative proposals for leveraging artificial intelligence in education. In a move that prioritizes efficiency over chaos, education providers are empowering teachers with AI tools to streamline administrative tasks such as grading, providing student feedback, and lesson planning, freeing up more time for actual teaching. By presenting AI as a trainers’ ultimate productivity enhancer.
According to Magic College, their artificial intelligence tools, including quiz mills and text summarizers, have been adopted by approximately 2.5 million educators. Khan Academy offers a cutting-edge digital learning companion, dubbed “Khanmigo,” an AI-powered teaching assistant that provides personalized guidance and support to educators, empowering them to facilitate effective instruction in subjects ranging from computer programming to the humanities. Coaches specializing in writing, such as Pressto, offer guidance to lecturers on providing feedback to students on their essays.
According to a study by McKinsey and Microsoft in 2020, ed-tech companies often reference the finding that educators work an average of 50 hours per week, a staggering statistic that underscores the time-consuming nature of their profession. Teachers often dedicate extensive hours to tasks such as marking papers, preparing lesson plans, and completing administrative paperwork. According to the report, incorporating artificial intelligence tools could potentially free up instructors from an additional 13 hours of work each week.
Corporations aren’t the only ones making this pitch? Policymakers and educators have been at the forefront of promoting artificial intelligence (AI) integration in classrooms over the past year. Steering guidelines from training departments in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and U.S. states such as North Carolina and Colorado have been issued to help educators develop effective and safe strategies for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices.
While enthusiasm among instructors to demonstrate select tasks to an artificial intelligence model varies, depending on the task, according to Leon Furze, a lecturer and PhD candidate at Deakin University studying the impact of generative AI on writing instruction and education.
According to him, numerous studies confirm that trainers’ workloads primarily stem from gathering and evaluating information, generating reports, and maintaining communication channels. “All of these areas could potentially benefit from AI assistance.”
There exist several tasks that lecturers are increasingly hesitant to relinquish to the capabilities of AI. Teaching responsibilities often boil down to two fundamental duties: crafting engaging lessons and evaluating student performance through rigorous grading processes. Corporations claim to offer large language models capable of generating lesson plans tailored to diverse curriculum needs. Some instructors have also employed AI models alongside others, using them to grade and provide feedback on essays. According to Furze, many lecturers he collaborates with express skepticism about the dependability of AI for these specific objectives.
When corporations claim time-saving financial benefits for planning and grading, it’s an enormous red flag since these are core elements of the teaching profession. He emphasizes that “lesson planning is—or must be—thoughtful, innovative, even enjoyable.” Additionally, automated suggestions on creative skills like writing remain controversial: “Students need feedback from people, and evaluation is a way for teachers to get to know their students better.” While some suggestions may be automated, they are not all.
