The use of AI in education: Practicalities and ethical considerations

Abstract

There is a wide diversity of views on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI), ranging from overenthusiastic pronouncements about how it is imminently going to transform our lives to alarmist predictions about how it is going to cause everything from mass unemployment to the destruction of life as we know it. In this article, I look at the practicalities of AI in education and at the attendant ethical issues it raises. My key conclusion is that AI in the near- to medium-term future has the potential to enrich student learning and complement the work of (human) teachers without dispensing with them. In addition, AI should increasingly enable such traditional divides as ‘school versus home’ to be straddled with regard to learning. AI offers the hope of increasing personalization in education, but it is accompanied by risks of learning becoming less social. There is much that we can learn from previous introductions of new technologies in school to help maximize the likelihood that AI can help students both to flourish and to learn powerful knowledge. Looking further ahead, AI has the potential to be transformative in education, and it may be that such benefits will first be seen for students with special educational needs. This is to be welcomed.