The point is the process
Assessment is the feedback loop that teaching and learning run on. AI can cut that loop, or make it stronger.
Daniel GibbonCo-founder and CEO, EdexiaAI use in education is particularly problematic, because the point of education isn’t the product. It’s the process and the learning. Education is a lot harder to implement AI into than other industries, because a lot of the time the work is the point.
The assessment process is such a fundamental component of the teacher to student relationship and feedback loop. If you disconnect that, and the teacher is no longer reading the student’s work, it’s going to be hard for them to actually know what to teach, and it’s also going to be hard for them to actually know their student.
“The point of education isn’t the product. It’s the process and the learning.”
AI is an interesting one, particularly in the assessment space. It simultaneously has the ability to completely destroy the whole point of education and negate all cognitive load. Sometimes it’s actually more of a negative than a positive, with students using it to replace most of their thinking. Even if it’s easy to produce the product, we’ve got to make sure they’re actually learning what matters in the first place.
Right now AI is disconnecting the teacher and the student in a lot of classes, where the student’s using AI in the corner, not really telling the teacher. They’re hiding that away from their teacher, because they don’t want them to know.
It isn’t only students. A teacher will generate feedback with AI and then just send it off as their own, and it’s very clearly AI, and it slightly degrades the trust between the teacher and the student. If you just let AI grade things, it actually slowly degrades the professional development of teachers. They’re not making their own judgements.
So we’re not anti-AI. We’re anti-inappropriate use of AI. When it’s a summative and it’s a high-stakes assessment, we should not be throwing this into ChatGPT and getting it graded. We should be doing it ourselves.
Used well, it can make the loop stronger. A student will write something, give it to the teacher, and since the feedback’s only one week later, they just don’t even action it. They look at it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s all right.” They don’t rewrite the piece. They don’t really internalise it. Whereas now if they’re given instant feedback, they have no excuse anymore.
They get a few iterations in, then the teacher can come in, see the full history of the process, and add a batch of their own feedback. It brings it under one umbrella, where the teacher can see the chat history, add their own feedback, and the student can continue to iterate. So it feels more a part of the classroom, rather than separated from it.
The key is trying to get this kind of technology to help uplift things without removing that relationship, but rather improving it. That’s the big component we’ve had to focus on with the technology: how do you use this to strengthen the teacher-student relationship rather than distance it?
It’s really easy to have an interesting demo and really hard for it to actually have an impact. Potential, we can talk about as much as we want, and it’s always just going to be potential. We’ve got to actually see if it’s genuinely validated in the real world.