The question of whether education technology is “good” is far more nuanced than “yes” or “no.”
The goal of technology integration is for the use of technology to become routine and transparent when the focus of a child or educator is on the activity or exploration itself, not on the technology being used. When the use of technology tools supports educator and program goals for children, provides children with digital tools for learning and communicating, and helps to improve child outcomes, then technology integration has been successful.
THE BIG ISSUE
Many adaptive learning products, for instance, equate successful learning with rapid increases in student performance, but performance is not a reliable indicator of learning and conflating these two ideas encourages poor instructional strategies and generates misleading indicators of student mastery.
This motivates us to think if the education technology today really fills the gaps in student’s learning or just setting a false notion of mastering the concept by making them solve the questions asked based on pattern identification.
The use of AI among the other things has become a trend in education and is a breakthrough in education space. The measured efficacy of these technologies is yet to be revealed and understood thoroughly. Because ultimately its an algorithm, not a human being to look into the root cause of the problem unless we program it to do so. People involved should do their research on how to measure the learning outcomes of the student rather than just focusing on the performance of the student in their product.
THE CONCERN
The most important aspect the AI technology missing in education is that it doesn’t help the students evolve by themselves but in many ways sidelines them to choose an easier way out to solve or understand something that challenges them. Students have to have discussions within their brain and should contemplate connecting the dots in the concepts rather than everything already explained.
For instance, a student trying to learn a new concept parabola in mathematics is restricted to watch and learn from the content provided in the product and has nothing to support the student to further go deep into the concept if he is not able to grasp it. But did get a new formula on the parabola.
Here things get way too mechanical as the child didn’t understand the concept in depth and proceeds to next step i.e; practice question. Now question put in front of the child questions his memory and some analytical skills but not the issue the child has.
As of now, we are nowhere near the technology that has the ability to assess items that don’t have a specific technical requirement associated with them, such as cognitive abilities.
FINAL WORDS
The possibility of a personalized education that can be more engaging and time saving for teachers and help to predict a student’s learning process is invaluable. However, we still have a long way to go.
