Artificial Intelligence and Education

Governments and institutions are facing the new demands of a rapidly changing society. Among many significant trends, some facts should be considered (Silverstein, 2006): (1) the increment of number and type of students; and (2) the limitations imposed by educational costs and course schedules. About the former, the need of a continuous update of knowledge and competences in an evolving work environment requires life-long learning solutions. An increasing number of young adults are returning to classrooms in order to finish their graduate degrees or attend postgraduate programs to achieve an specialization on a certain domain. About the later, due to the emergence of new types of students, budget constraints and schedule conflicts appear. Workers and immigrants, for instance, are relevant groups for which educational costs and job incompatible schedules could be the key factor to register into a course or to give up a program after investing time and effort on it. In order to solve the needs derived from this social context, new educational approaches should be proposed: (1) to improve and extend the online learning courses, which would reduce student costs and allows to cover the educational needs of a higher number of students, and (2) to automate learning processes, then reducing teacher costs and providing a more personalized educational experience anytime, anywhere. As a result of this context, in the last decade an increasing interest on applying computer technologies in the field of Education has been observed. On this regard, the paradigms of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field are attracting an special attention to solve the issues derived from the introduction of computers as supporting resources of different learning strategies. In this paper we review the state-of-art of the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the field of Education, focusing on (1) the most popular educational tools based on AI, and (2) the most relevant AI techniques applied on the development of intelligent educational systems.