AI Grand Challenges for Education

Artificial intelligence impacts growth and productivity in many industries (e.g., transportation, communication, commerce, and finance). However, one painful exception is education; today, very few AI-based learning systems are consistently used in classrooms or homes. Yet the potential for an impact on education is great: today’s instructional software now routinely tailors learning to individual needs, connects learners together, provides access to digital materials, supports decentralized learning tools and engages students in meaningful ways. As a society we have great expectations from the educational establishment (train employees, support scientific and artistic development, transmit culture, etc.) and yet, no matter how much is achieved, society continues to expect even more from education. The current educational environment (fixed classrooms, repeated lectures and static printed textbooks) is clearly not capable of either serving society nor of flexibly changing for the future. Classrooms and printed textbooks are especially inappropriate for people who use technology on a daily basis. For example, digital natives learn and work at twitch speed, through parallel processing, with graphics and connected to others (vs. stand alone) (Beavis, 2010). For these digital natives, information is instantly available, change is constant, distance and time do not matter, and multimedia entertainment is omnipresent. No wonder schools and classrooms are boring!