Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), the educational model can be personalized to extreme degrees, designing an individual experience for each of the students . This is basically possible because more data than ever about the students can be collected and their progress, reactions and behavior can also be studied in real time thanks to the surveillance cameras provided with facial recognition algorithms.
Until now, education systems have forced most students to learn in the same way, at the same speed, in the same place and at the same time. This pattern was unavoidable given the time and limited attention that a teacher could provide to each individual student.
However, the perception, recognition and recommendation capabilities of AI allow teachers to adapt the learning program to each student, while freeing up more time for more individualized attention, as is already the case in Squirrel centers .
The problem with a classroom with thirty or forty students is that a single teacher must teach the same class format for all, imposing the same speed, entering all concepts equally, assuming a kind of flat rate of attention. At the same time, the teacher must listen to the reactions of all the students to identify if someone may have been lost or distracted or is not completing an exercise satisfactorily.
This workload is not acceptable for a human being , but for an AI, which is able to look individually at each of the students, measure how they react to different teaching methods, the degree of attention they maintain, how fast that answers the questions, how they react to different stimuli and incentives and a long etcetera that is compiled in databases that can later be analyzed to determine the changes in the teaching of each student.
Facial recognition cameras can even draw inferences from students that a human teacher would be unable to appreciate even if they were teaching just one of them: small gestures, puzzled expressions, blinking speed, etc. The AI can also detect patterns of emotions and other details that can be collected to be given to the parents of students to assess the need to hire specific tutors .
All this information can be incorporated directly into a student profile, which is updated at all times depending on the slight changes that occur in the setting, the teaching method or the type of content.
In English classes, for example, voice recognition algorithms will allow the pronunciation of each student to be evaluated more effectively , as well as offer solutions to improve intonation or accent, without the need for each class to have a native speaker of English.
Even the duties that are sent to be done at home can be adapted to each profile, because there will be those who will have to reinforce certain deficiencies. If the homework is always the same for everyone, the students cannot get the same out of it. Thanks to AI, however, the student will have to complete exercises adapted to their level or complementary material will be offered to compensate for certain deficiencies. Throughout the curricular year, the system updates its understanding model and adjusts the curriculum accordingly.
Finally, the exercises can be corrected automatically , at least in their most basic elements such as the identification of spelling mistakes, allowing more time for the teacher to explain higher-level writing concepts to students.
Almost all of these tools already exist and many of them are already being implemented in different classes throughout China , such as in the Squirrel centers.
At these booster centers they focus on helping students get better grades on annual standardized tests. There are no blackboards, projectors or other equipment here, just one table per room, intended for six or eight people. Problems are solved on sheets of paper before submitting your answers online. For each course offered, an engineering team works with a group of teachers to subdivide the topic into the smallest possible conceptual pieces . Mathematics, for example, is divided into more than 10,000 atomic elements or “knowledge points,” like the Pythagorean theorem, with the goal of diagnosing a student’s understanding gaps as accurately as possible.
These centers, and more and more schools in China, are catapulting the educational foundations of teachers and also students themselves into the 21st century.
