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There’s plenty of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential, future impact on society. In many areas, such as manufacturing, defence, transport and health, AI is already impacting significantly. In the tech industry, it’s already seen as a notorious element in targeted advertising, surveillance and propaganda (for example in recent elections). That’s where the money is, so it’s where the most frenetic development work is focused. But this is all very low level stuff right now compared to what could happen. There is plenty of scope for AI to transgress the boundaries of artificial narrow intelligence, but until it does, it remains fairly limited. And in education, it is barely present. So, if and when, it does begin to make its presence felt in our schools, colleges and universities, what might we expect?

Writing on CIO’s Managing Innovation and Disruptive Technology website, futurist Nicholas D. Evans suggests there are four AI trends we can expect to see. The first he says, is where AI begins to influence the choices learners will have. At present, the golden touchstone is in personalised learning, where anytime, anyplace education is possible through mobile technologies. Evans writes:

“Firstly, online education will have evolved beyond omni-channel (anytime, anywhere) to omni-choice whereby students will be able to select and configure every pathway in their learning journey to personalize and customize their near-term and long-term learning plan and approach to their unique situation, needs and interests. 

“As an example, with self-driving cars commonplace – learning will be conducted at home, in class or on the road during lengthy commutes, with students able to pick up and resume their online courses on any device in any location and in any duration and format. AI will help to hyper-personalize this omni-choice functionality so that students can focus more on their actual learning and less on the mechanics of their learning.”

 I quite like the idea of ‘omni-choice’ learning, where each learner can shape their pathways individually to suit their expectations, needs, approaches to study and personal contexts. At present it is quite impossible for any educator to tailor-make study programmes for individual students. Evans doesn’t go on to describe how AI will make omni-choice learning possible, but the promise sits there, ripe for the picking. It will likely be achieved through a combination of learning analytics (big data) and the evolution of personal technologies and ubiquitous computing. We will see in the next few years whether this promise is realised.

Next time on Our Digital Futures 10: Cognitive courseware.

Previous posts in this series:
1: Telecommunications
2: Classrooms
3: Music
4: Enhanced vision
5: Robot teachers?
6: Home learning
7: Work
8: Artificial Intelligence

Our digital future: Omni-choice learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.