Education with AI: a thought experiment

If we are to progress with using OpenAI tools for learning, we need to find the best ways to incorporate those capabilities into the current MO as a starting point, because no institution is going to start over from scratch willingly. But say we could start over from scratch with AI tools aiding learning? What would that look like?

There’s general agreement that the best teachers accomplish a lot more than the average teacher in creating openings and motivations for even the most challenged students. But needless to say, learning has been limited by the scaling problem…one can’t clone humans, as yet, and the “best teacher” supply is clearly limited, and a small fraction of what we need.

So in designing an AI student interaction one would certainly look to what the best teachers do, and how they do it. Then one would design an AI API that focuses on the same MO, and try to replicate what the best teachers do, as much as possible. But what do the best teachers do?

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1. They communicate very well in the style of language that the student is most comfortable with. Said style includes “local” vocabulary, and emotional content such as tone of voice.
2. They display genuine enthusiasm for the subject matter, the teaching and learning process, in a manner that is “catching” for the students.
3. They give quality and sincere support with the message to all students that “they can do this”.
4. They note and praise student achievements.
5. They will be open to answering questions.
6. They construct expectations for the learning outcomes that are clear, and provide obvious methods/ means for achieving those outcomes.
7. They create sub groups for class projects.
8. They facilitate class discussions.

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There’s more to the above picture of best teachers’ best practices, but that’s a good start to itemizing what we would like Learning AI to “look like” and to be able to simulate in substantial ways that can be scaled up to the huge numbers of students in the US. (elsewhere too?)

We might start by noting that the best teacher “intangibles” will be a challenge to “replicate/ simulate” in effective ways. However, AI can learn from interactions, and there may be student profiles that include data that AI can use to personalize content.

This is the first in a series of “What do great teachers actually do that is great?”