The irrepressible march towards Artificial intelligence (AI) playing a significantly increased role in the education environment has been underlined through a new project funded by the UK Government.
The investment in facilitating the use of AI through the establishment of an expanded database of teaching knowledge and experience is the latest international commitment to AI in future education provision and management.
Like many governments throughout the world, the UK is recognising that in the future AI will play a important part in improving educational outcomes.
Education sectors throughout the world recognise that assignment marking is swallowing excessive teacher time; there is a challenge in achieving consistency in grading; marking is an onerous task that can dramatically increase workload and, for students, traditional grading methods can prevent timely feedback and impact any required corrective learning.
But one of the major hurdles to developing and improving the effectiveness of AI is the lack of data coming from the classroom.
The latest project, backed by a multi-million pound investment, will pool government documents including curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content. The content, such as tailored, creative lesson plans and workbooks, can then be reliably used in schools.
The content store is targeted at technology companies specialising in education to build tools that will help teachers and Marking AI(Edtech Enterprises?) is already pursuing involvement in the programme. Ultimately, the aim is to expand the capability of AI in marking work, creating teaching materials for the classroom and assisting with routine school admin.
The latest research shows that parents want teachers to use generative AI so they have more time to help children in the classroom with face-to-face teaching – supporting the global mission to break down barriers to opportunity. However, teachers and AI developers are clear that better data is needed to make these technologies work properly.
The goal is to ease administrative burdens and help teachers deliver creative and inspiring lessons every day, while reducing time pressures they face.
Securing better data is a fundamental part of maximising the potential of AI, with research showing that providing generative AI models with this kind of data can increase accuracy to 92% – up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model.
Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a recent survey, and the content store will take this to the next level by offering easy access to high quality evidence based and legally compliant education materials. Developed with input from educators, this will support effective teaching practices and foster collaboration and innovation.
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