Learning at your own pace with AI

When Singapore emerged from a two-thirty day period extended COVID-19-imposed Circuit Breaker (CB), AI Singapore, a countrywide Synthetic Intelligence (AI) plan established up by the National Study Basis (NRF) to anchor deep nationwide capabilities in AI, introduced the AI vs COVID-19 Ideation Obstacle. The purpose was to “motivate the curation of innovative concepts making use of AI approaches and technologies to improve people’s life through and after the pandemic”.

Open to all total-time students aged 13 many years or more mature at local general public academic institutions up to universities, the competitiveness sought to recognize current methods to issues that could be better enhanced with the use of AI.

SMU Masters of IT in Business pupil Huang Xiaoling won one of the places for the 10 most effective entries for her Personalized Training Assistant proposal:

“A electronic teaching assistant that is customized to the development of every student. Learners require to get a quiz on a normal foundation to check out their understanding of the topics. From these quizzes, scores which establish their knowledge will be instantly computed for every single student. Dependent on their scores, the instructing assistant will share the scores with the students and prompt them for even further readings.”

“It truly is nevertheless a robotic or a chatbot, no a single will sit upcoming to you and go as a result of the material line by line. College students have to have to take the initiative to use the tool,” points out Huang, who came up with the plan right after tackling on line finding out modules all through the CB lockdown which closed all colleges.

Developing for quality (time)

She uncovered, as an grownup, the on the net instruction a problem. Young students, she reasoned, would probable require far more assistance to continue to be fascinated and centered.

The key advantage of the proposed answer is that college students have a instructing assistant that is obtainable on need, which will allow college students to learn at their own tempo. The major payoff is learners can soak up better, and an maximize in household time that would usually have been swallowed up by tuition and enrichment classes.

Huang’s proposal is portion of an ideation workout, which did not demand specialized facts these as hardware necessities and software program/programming. But if Singapore AI decides to take up this thought and flip it into actuality, what may possibly the road blocks be?

“Based on the latest technological know-how landscape and know-how available out there, I you should not imagine coming up with a software like this would be more durable than finding the end users to undertake it,” she tells the Business office of Analysis and Tech Transfer. “It will be hard to get the learners to just take the collection of assessments to calibrate their understanding. With out customers, the resource would be a white elephant.

“The instrument ought to both be interactive or contain factors of gamification in order to entice students to use it. I believe that the implementation and execution are the most complicated.”

With regard to how the Tailored Instructing Assistant could be crafted, Huang singled out All-natural Language Processing (NLP) as the major technology to appear at, even even though there may possibly be obstacles when it comes to instructing Chinese.

“NLP in English is really made, but simply because of the language complexity, it could be really difficult to establish a proper tool for Chinese at the minute,” notes Huang. “So I think the Chinese language will not be anything the Custom made Instructing Assistant can enable with initially.”

Huang concedes that the Custom-made Teaching Assistant would call for shut participation from dad and mom of children underneath 10. For the mom of a 6-calendar year-previous baby who is about to get started Primary One particular, it might actually be a blessing in disguise.

“Despite the fact that moms and dads will require to sit down and go through the classes jointly with their younger kids, the kids get to devote time with their mothers and fathers, alternatively than with the enrichment teachers,” Huang states. “I consider that’s high quality time little ones get to commit with mom and dad.”

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Presented by
Singapore Managment College