AI For Education: What to Teach and How to Teach?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming education. Researchers and educators are concerned how to prepare future-ready learners by advocating responsible, ethical and critical use of AI for teaching and learning without the erosion of critical skills from the learners. Now is a salient opportunity for us to think: what and how to teach/learn in an era of AI? In this issue of SingTeach, education researchers and practitioners share their views and experiences in using AI for teaching and learning from different perspectives.

AI literacy has become a hot topic in today’s educational discourses. Educators are exploring how to prepare students for a world in which AI is becoming an important part of current and future careers. It is not just about teaching students how to do coding or programming like what computing teachers do. AI literacy is a set of knowledge, skills, competencies and dispositions that students should have. These include the knowledge and understanding of the affordances, capabilities and limitations of AI, communicating and collaborating effectively with AI, and using AI in a creative, critical, ethical and responsible way.

The Big Idea article highlights the notion of human-AI synergy, which examines ways for humans and computers to work synergistically, rather than focusing on whether humans or AI have better control. Human interactions with AI go beyond feeding AI with prompts and responses. It can be seen as a “social” interaction involving conversation, negotiation, exploration and co-creation between humans and AI.

How can we leverage AI technologies to design better learning experiences and environments for students? Dr Elizabeth Koh has developed a digital formative assessment tool for teamwork, called Teamwork Intelligence for Tertiary Education (TITE). AI technologies have been used to provide meaningful analytics on students’ teamwork intelligence. Associate Professor Tan Seng Chee and his team have developed some proof of concepts on using generative AI to enhance teacher education and learning.

Many educators have been actively exploring and experimenting with AI for teaching and learning. Teachers have been using AI to help plan lessons and create engaging educational content. They can innovate their teaching with “learn-with-AI” pedagogies. For example, they can design meaningful learning tasks by leveraging different roles of generative AI in students’ learning journey
by taking on the role of a tutor (providing information and instruction), a guide (offering real-time feedback or encouraging reflection), a collaborator (co-generating ideas, co-designing artifacts or accomplishing tasks together), or even a student (being taught by a human).

In this issue, Mr Edmund Lee and Mr Victor Chew from Rosyth School share their experiences in identifying students who need more help in particular areas of Math with the support of AI-enabled Adaptive Learning System developed by MOE. Mr Lau Chee Keen from Anglo-Chinese Junior College and Mr Chan Kuang Wen from Raffles Institution share their views on opportunities and challenges brought by AI.

The area of AI for education will continue to evolve in a landscape of technological changes and innovations. AI complements and augments human capabilities, not replace them; it is important to maintain the human roles in the essential processes of learning. No matter how advance the field of AI in education develops, we must avoid focusing on using AI to make humans less human. AI should empower humans to become better masters of AI instead of a servant to AI.

Associate Professor Chen Wenli
Head, Learning Sciences and Assessment Academic Group
National Institute of Education