IS AI COMING FOR YOUR JOB? Mark Gash thinks not.
The last 12 months have been pretty eventful, right? AI, previously only mentioned in nerdy conversations about how Terminator’s Skynet would one day rise up to destroy humanity, decided 2023 was the year to turn science fiction into science fact. So far, its intentions have seemed fairly benign - it’s empowered lazy marketeers to pump out a month’s worth of ‘Top 5 things you need to know about SEO’ blogs in 10 minutes and written a million variations of school kids’ coursework on the Treaty of Versailles. So in terms of education - and by extension, e-learning - it’s definitely had an impact, but is it really the threat to our way of life that some people have been touting? Or is it here to help? Around May last year, once the ChatGPT cat was out of the bag, there were sensationalist news stories about how pupils were using AI to cheat at every possible opportunity. Of course, they were - they’re kids. If I’d had ChatGPT when I was 16, I would have done the same instead of trying to peer over Rea Dickinson’s shoulder to copy her answers in History. Teenagers, and let’s face it, humans, will always find ways to do less work, and that isn’t always a bad thing. We’re a long way from living in a utopia where AI does all the grunt work whilst the whole of mankind sips Pina Coladas on a beach and sings Kumbaya, but surely that’s got to be on the cards somewhere down the line? In the meantime, we need to find ways to ensure that AI is used responsibly rather than get whipped up into a frenzy that it’s going to steal our women (insert your own preferred gender here, this is an equal opportunities article) and our jobs.
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So, with that in mind, let’s take some deep breaths, let go of our James Cameron-inspired fears and look at how AI is going to improve the e-learning experience for all.
Automation of mind-numbing tasks Put your hand up if you like making assessments and marking them. Nobody? That’s what I thought. Let AI assimilate all of the course information and resources, then set it the task of creating and grading quizzes, tracking student progress, and offering personalised feedback, based on your own knowledge and criteria of the subject. Sure, you can dip in and check that the AI’s work is up to your standards, but you’ll soon feel confident enough to just let it get on with things, freeing up your time to hone your instructional design craft and develop engaging content for your learners.
Personalising the learning experience If you’re a teacher delivering courses, you might have a fairly good grip on the knowledge level of your individual students, allowing you to tweak your learning for each one. With an LMS, you can set different cohorts of people on different learning paths, but this still takes a degree of manual effort. If you’re a training manager at an organisation with hundreds or thousands of staff, tailoring learning based on your knowledge of individuals becomes a lot trickier, if not impossible. But what if AI could analyse unique learning data from individuals and design
