Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first coined in 1956 by John McCarthy but only brought into the spotlight around 2016. Since then, the fraternity of educators are becoming more and more conscious of the importance of augmenting AI into their job. This morning, we had the opportunity to co-organise a webinar with SGInnovate around this very topic – The Present and Future of AI in Education. Our Founder and CEO Sinuhé Arroyo moderated the discussion with experienced professionals that come from different angles in the education space – Dr Richard Yen, Mr Lau Kai Cheong and Mr Tan Chor Meng. They discussed 3 key themes in education: Content, Teaching Methods and Assessment.

Huge potential for AI applications in grading and assessment

Of these, the one that gained the most attention amongst our panelists was assessment. This wasn’t surprising as from a poll amongst the attendees, 41% had incorporated AI into their Teaching Methods, 31% in the area of Content, but only 24% said they had incorporated AI into Assessment.

Dr Yen shared a story about how students in the U.S. managed to game the grading system in their school which used AI to grade their assignment. He shared that although overtime AI will improve it is still in its early stages. Mr Lau encouraged entrepreneurs to help the industry firstly in this area of marking and grading, and especially for subjects which are subjective and have no standard answer. He said that “finding ways to make the process more efficient and effective for faculty members would always be welcomed”. When it comes to assessing the competencies of an individual, it often requires an understanding of different learning styles and how different individuals might respond to different assessment types. This makes 1-to-1 tutoring very effective. However, Mr Tan said that although effective in ensuring quality education, it is unfortunately very expensive to scale and thus this is where AI ought to assist in with its ability to recognise different learning styles at scale.

One common thread amongst all panelists is that we are still in the early stages of AI applications in education especially in Singapore. That being said, AI is already present and available like how Mr Lau cited bookmarking topics in a 3hr seminar recording with speech-to-text and search capabilities. Affirming that, Sinuhé said, “we often think about the grandeur of AI, but there are technologies out there like speech-to-text and search which are very much AI that can be put to work”.

The path to AI adoption in Education lies in the ability to tailor AI tools

It seems that accelerating AI adoption in the Education space requires not just the combination of cognitive capabilities but also the ability to customise the tools that make up the overall product capabilities so as to facilitate the integration of AI into the industry.

This is an area of focus for TAIGER. Our products use tools that we build ourselves where we incorporate a hybrid of AI disciplines to get the optimal solution. This gives us the flexibility to customise these tools to meet the specific needs of our clients. Moreover, given assessments are mostly unstructured information, a lot of cognitive capabilities are essential. This is why at TAIGER, we pride ourselves on our ability to read, process and verify unstructured documents with high accuracy and in a shorter period of time. We see ourselves as a long-term partner of our clients through their digital transformation journey no matter which stage they are at so feel free to get in touch with us directly to find out how you can lead the digital transformation in your organisation.

You may watch the full recording of the webinar here.