Welcome to This Week’s Edition of the Lo Down!

Apologies on the delay to this weeks’ edition. I was sick this week (I think Covid) so was down for a good part of the week. But I nonetheless feel committed to you and wanted to get this edition to you this week - for your reading pleasure!

Let’s dive in. 🚀

📚 AI And Education

This week I’m going to examine AI and its impact to education.

My views largely come from three parts: one its my work at the university level, teaching CS355, an entrepreneurship course primarily defined by AI; the second interacting with practitioners in the education space like my work with Harvard Business Publishing; the third is my work on the secondary level like my work at Malvern College Hong Kong, where I have signed up to teach next semester.

I think AI and education fits together well. There are a few aspects why:

Course Planning and Creation

Creating a course means triangulating a few perspectives together; one is from a teacher’s perspective and what direction to take the content forward. Second is the time scheduling and how to parse that content into more manageable pieces for optimal understanding; this task becomes harder when there are multiple time zones involved as in the case of remote teaching. The third perspective is the ongoing triage necessary once the course is taught, and whether the course materials, the pace, or any other things need to be changed as the course continues.

The third perspective becomes nominally less important for a course that’s been taught for a few years. Hopefully at that point there has been enough student feedback for the course to have iterated and improved.

Student Assignment Grading:

AI can help with assignment grading, as student assignments can be uploaded into ChatGPT for grading; and if not for final grading, at least for a conversation with AI around its grade versus the whole classroom’s grades.

This action becomes harder if the grading is not test based, but rather discussion based, which we defaulted to with our CS 355 course.

In retrospect, perhaps some aspects of grading would have been better if it were test based so we could have experimented with this function to test its capabilities.

Course Improvement

This is its own category because even though there is one facet that lies within Course Planning and Creation, the ongoing conversations with AI to improve the course is so powerful that it merits its own category.

Student assignment grading can also lead to course improvement as well.

Scenario Planning

This is something I didn’t try as much, but I noticed that Harvard for example had something where you could plan a scenario with teaching materials and simulate a problem student, for example.

This probably isn’t as necessary for a mature course, but for a new course or a new teacher/facilitator, I can see where this would be valuable.

What’s the way forward?

Subscribe to Default to read the rest.