How Conversational AI Is Shaping the Future of the Education Sector Are you talking to a human behind a keyboard or a chatbot?
By Saurabh Kumar Edited by Heather Wilkerson
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
None of us could have predicted where the global pandemic would take us, but the year 2020 created more digitalization than the past decade. Today, small and large enterprises are finding themselves augmented with this digital transformation, and real change is happening at scale. Fortune 500 companies to start-ups are leveraging the scopes of conversational AI chatbots to enhance their business processes in areas like customer service, employee support, workflow automation, employee onboarding and more.
We have also witnessed how healthcare, education, mass media and finance are benefiting from conversational AI. But how about the education sector?
Where does the education sector stand in the Covid era?
Since 2020, academic learning has progressively become mobile, and educational institutions are searching for diverse techniques to boost student experiences by executing various tech solutions. AI technology continuously closes the gaps in learning and teaching and helps deliver personalized and efficient education. After the Covid outbreak, educational institutions started to adopt virtual admission, virtual classrooms and virtual examinations.
Related: 3 Reasons Our Lives Online Are Here to Stay
It's quite amazing how quickly the transformation happened. Language software, eLearning apps and collaboration tools have shown an incredible surge in usage.
World Economic Forum reports that before the outbreak, the global education technology investment had marked a high growth by hitting $18.66 billion. By 2025, the overall marketplace of online education is expected to reach $350 billion. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that conversational AI-based education is the future. It will play a prime role in delivering education going forward.
Conversational AI in education
Being a subcategory of artificial intelligence, conversational AI is an essential part of the modern teaching and learning method geared to renovate the entire education sector.
Conversational AI contributes to smooth communication by enabling natural dialogue between users and computers, a requirement for successful education. With natural language processing support, conversational AI recognizes students' queries and delivers better, human-like responses to their requirements.
Conversational AI commonly includes virtual assistance and chatbots that are useful in the education process.
Why does the education sector need a conversational AI chatbot?
An AI-powered chatbot can perform a human-like conversation with the user using natural language via collaboration platforms, phone applications and websites. Since we live in a digital era, it won't take much time for educational institutions to fail without tech backup. Adopting conversational AI in educational organizations is about embracing the technology to keep students engaged and streamlining the learning process more effectively anytime, anywhere.
This will help boost student retention and teach students with top-notch digital tools for success throughout their educational career and beyond.
Related: This Is How Conversational AI Is Helping Businesses
Impact of conversational AI on education
Earlier students depended on huge libraries and massive volumes of books and journals to submit assignments to their professors. Today conversational AI is making the education process interesting, collaborating for the students while simplifying the teaching process. It examines information, evaluates a student's knowledge level and provides classes considering their personalized requirements.
AI-powered conversational tools are transforming the learning sector with interactive and customized tools. So how is conversational AI is shaping the future of education?
Personalized learning experiments: Educational organizations can deliver personalized content for each student based on their interests with the help of conversational AI. By responding to students' queries and delivering personalized feedback, conversational AI adjusts the learning pace based on each student's requirement.
AI-powered teaching assistants: Conversational bots can simulate a virtual teaching assistant. It can respond to student queries according to given instructions. Bots can identify which content is more suitable for students and provide personalized learning activities. Conversational AI can also evaluate students' learning progress, deliver personalized feedback and suggest more significant learning content.
Better, smarter, instant support: Conversational AI technology allows students to get support immediately. An AI-powered chatbot can help students gain data related to the admission process plus share vital details about the courses, modules, professors, project deadlines, event updates, etc. It also gives insights about facilities, rooms, library membership process and scholarships without causing any delay.
Automated administrative works: Education includes various administrative tasks that can be automated with conversational AI. From evaluating assignments to grading reports, AI can be used to minimize manual administrative tasks so that professors can spend time with their students.
Smart, safe and secure feedback: Feedback is vital for both faculty and students to enhance the entire learning process. Conversational AI organizes feedback. It will collect all the feedback and highlight the common points. Student feedback provides an opportunity for the faculty to find gaps in their teaching efforts and enhance them in the future. The feedback from the professors allows students to find the areas they need to put extra effort into.
Conversational AI is the future of the education sector
The future of conversational AI in the education sector is presaged to be vibrant and result-driven. It started to transform the whole education sector by changing conversational teaching techniques. Technologies like speech recognition, instant answering, automation and predictive capabilities deliver students access to personalized and rapidly developing education. Faculty can also plan each student's growth in real-time with conversational AI chatbots.
Since everyone is benefiting, it is definite that the education sector will see better use of conversational AI augmenting the student interests, nurturing education, enhancing the coaching method and supporting the organizations to update processes.
Related: What the Past Year Has Taught Us About the Gaps in Technology for Education
New concept: microlearning
There is no doubt that the pandemic made unique opportunities and a new revolution in teaching, learning practices and content delivery — and that revolution is microlearning. It provides innovative learning opportunities through small bursts of teaching materials that students can understand in a short period, based on their desired timetable and location.
