Harnessing the power of generative AI in the classroom and beyond

This blog is the first in a series that discusses how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in education. The series includes stories from AWS customers that are using generative AI to create more personalised and engaging learning experiences.

For decades, AI and its potential have captivated human curiosity. The use of AI in addressing industry challenges has been steadily increasing with the pace of innovation. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has built AI technologies for more than 20 years, delivering solutions such as consumer personalization at Amazon checkout or natural language processing (NLP) on Alexa. More recently, with generative AI democratization, the excitement from both industry and user communities about the potential of this technology is unprecedented.

But can this groundbreaking innovation help in addressing more complex societal issues, such as the equality of access to education?

Despite efforts from educators and policymakers, students with additional needs and those who come from socio-economically deprived backgrounds continue to consistently perform worse than other groups. Student performance gaps stubbornly refuse to close while the demands placed on teaching professionals by time-consuming administrative tasks and the challenges associated with lesson preparations continue to increase.

As generative AI solutions evolve and become integrated into the education technology (EdTech) landscape, they present new opportunities which could help bridge performance gaps and effectively support teachers’ teaching and administrative workloads. Collaboration between industry and education is crucial to ensure that these technologies reach a sufficient level of maturity and robustness, so they can fully maximize their potential in educational settings.

Generative AI presents educators with an opportunity to create highly personalised work, aligned to the rate of progress manageable for each individual student, addressing their unique needs. In a recent survey that the EdTech McGraw Hill conducted with more than 1,100 educators in its global customer base, the capacity for AI to offer personalized learning experiences was ranked as the top reason for positive sentiment.

With personalization, we have seen some early impactful successes such as Ello, which is teaching young generations to read using generative AI. Ello and other EdTechs, such as McGraw Hill, have demonstrated that it is possible to build personalized learning experiences, with technology that understands, adapts, and responds to students. This helps educators make deeper connections with students.

AI can also be instrumental at a state or country level, helping to address broader issues like student well-being. The Department for Education of South Australia implemented an AI-powered platform to protect students online. Saasyan, an AWS Partner, built a solution using AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), that monitors and analyzes web searches, website visits, videos, chat, email, images, and documents to help ensure students’ safety and well-being.

Whilst these are impactful examples, is the education industry ready to adopt this transformative technology at scale?

The current education ecosystem is, by majority, characterized by stretched school budgets and outdated legacy technology. But the McGraw Hill survey showed promising results. Almost two in five educators currently use AI to some extent, and more than three-fourths have used or would be interested in using generative AI and virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) apps in their roles. Large-scale transformational change in this environment necessitates organizational alignment, coupled with the development of essential skills and understanding among both teachers and support staff and, most importantly, collaboration with the technology providers.

Industry collaboration is a core part of the business strategy for McGraw Hill. They are wholeheartedly invested in building partnerships between providers and stakeholders across the educational system — institutions, educators, learners, and parents.

The core part of McGraw Hill’s product development approach focuses closely on the provision of solutions that will benefit both students and educators across the entire learning ecosystem. The company has been taking a deliberate, responsible, and thoughtful approach to the integration of generative AI in their product suite and will be piloting exciting new initiatives in this space in the coming academic year. Their focus will be on developing a new AI-powered writing assist tool to support personalized learning in the writing space for K-12 learners, where they will receive real-time feedback and support with short answer responses. In higher education, generative AI features will be added to support student awareness of the concepts they don’t understand. McGraw Hill is also looking at tools to support efficient content discovery, and making product development more agile and responsive to customer needs, using AWS generative AI services.

Keen to ensure they have a robust and thorough understanding of the educators they partner with, their study highlighted the need to support educators, administrators, and learners in generative AI implementation with robust training and support.

The adoption of new technologies will require us to bridge skill and knowledge gaps in our education systems. According to UNESCO, more than 90 percent of teachers have never received any training or advice on how to use generative AI in school. This insight underpins McGraw Hill’s research showing that educators are keen for guidance and support around utilizing AI. Indeed, many educators are very keen to see more robust frameworks in place from their institutions on responsible AI usage.

There is a key role that technology providers need to play to enable appropriate and ethical use of generative AI tools. Tech providers must support educators, administrators, and learners in implementation, offer training and support, and facilitate best practice usage.

AWS offers generative AI courses for technical and non-technical staff to spread awareness of what generative AI technology can achieve in the workplace and the advantages it can bring to any organisation. In a similar way, McGraw Hill offers both high-level and subject-specific professional development webinars for educators to learn and discuss AI in education.

At the policy level, government-led education programmes are being implemented in some countries. Singapore is developing training to equip government staff with specialised knowledge as part of its national AI strategy.

By contrast, it’s the younger generation who find embracing new technology easy, particularly when learning is both easy and fun. This has been the focus of collaboration between Code.org and AWS, who have launched Dance Party: AI Edition, an activity designed to help K-12 students get hands-on experience in coding and experimenting with generative AI concepts.

We are undoubtedly in the very early days of the adoption of generative AI tools. Even so, we are starting to see that with an outcome-based focus and high-quality professional development, it can deliver education in ways that help level the playing field. This is done through true personalization, supporting teachers in managing their workloads, and providing support to the learners that most need it.

Over time, technology maturity combined with improved knowledge of educators, teachers, and technology providers will lead to changes in how education is delivered—similar to how we have seen remote learning taking up a permanent presence in the classroom.

As with any large-scale transformation, value can only be harnessed if there is an alignment on the north star goal of success: quality education to all pupils, regardless of their background.

Each group in the education value chain has a role to play. Technology providers, by delivering solutions and tools that are aligned to student and educator outcomes. Teachers and educators, by pursuing lifelong learning of education technology innovations. Public officials and policymakers, through a modern, government education policy that facilitates pedagogical change and embraces what digital transformation can offer.

To our readers, no matter which group you are in, how can you help in utilizing generative AI for greater impact and value? For some inspiration, listen to insights from AWS executive Valerie Singer on how generative AI is transforming education globally.