With its publishing business in free fall, Pearson Mis-Education is targeting teaching. On a Sunday in November Pearson ran a two-page centerfold ad in the New York Times promoting Aida, its artificial intelligence (?) program to teach calculus. Pearson claims Aida will provide a “personalized learning experience” and that the company is the first to apply “consumer apps” in education. I estimate the one-shot Times ad cost Pearson about $250,000.
Even if you don’t teach calculus, teachers need to worry about their jobs. According to the Aida website, “By combining AI with the learning sciences – psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, sociology and anthropology – we gain an understanding of what and how people learn. With AI, how people learn will start to become very different.”AI advocates promote a science fiction future with everybody plugged in and learning at their own and at a higher rate. It is an enormous potential market for Pearson, replacing 3,000,000 American teachers, with its algorithms.
Actually all human beings need to worry as Pearson explores mind control adapting to each person’s individual learning patterns. In China, the government monitors the brain waves of children to ensure attention using electronic headbands.
Unfortunately, preliminary studies don’t support an AI learning revolution. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded an Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program (ALMAP) to establish “evidence-based understanding of how adaptive learning technologies such as adaptive courseware could improve opportunities for low-income adults to learn and to complete postsecondary credentials.” It was of limited use because the study primarily looked at student and teacher attitudes about AI and largely ignored its impact on student learning and school success.
The study’s Executive Summary apologized for AI because of the “relative immaturity of the field of adaptive learning technology.” However, it assured educators and investors that “technology capacity and ways to support instruction and learning” were “evolving rapidly.” A major concern they found with AI products was actually getting students to use the courseware.
Other findings were that AI worked better at a micro level (tutoring) than on a macro level (classroom instruction); that marketing claims for a variety of AI products were suspect; and that “multiple factors affect learning outcomes and to make sense of student outcomes, analyses need to incorporate student characteristics, specifics of how the adaptive courseware is used, aspects of the course beyond the courseware product, and the way learning is measured to make sense of student outcomes.” In other words, we know very little about the benefits of AI in education, other than while initial costs were high, long term costs, once you get rid of teachers, will be significantly lower.
Recent studies by Nobel Memorial Prize winning micro-economists confirm the drawback of schools making heavy investments in untested technology. One study, conducted in Kenya, found that just adding resources to schools improved educational performance by top students, but not everybody else, increasing social and educational inequality. Another study focused on schools in Mumbai, India where government officials are in love with new technologies. This study found that, across the board, students performed better when schools used extra money to hire additional teachers. The study’s authors found that “there exists very little rigorous evidence on the impact of computers on educational outcomes and no reliable evidence for India or other developing countries.” Meanwhile, studies in developed countries like the United States and Western Europe “find little or no effect of computerized instruction on test scores.”
Of course there are a lot of other drawbacks to replacing teachers with online AI instruction. It adds to the already serious problem on teenage technology addiction; it robs children of personal interaction with teachers and classmates vital for social development; it leaves us more susceptible to Facebook type propaganda; and it actually depersonalizes education because it forces students into a singular mode of learning. A UNESCO report questioned the ethical application of online AI instruction, given data breaches and the misuse of information to influence public opinion and to sell products.
But why should any of this stop Pearson from making money?
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