AI Poised to Bring Extreme Personalization to our Children’s Classrooms
Brian Solis, digital analyst and futurist at Altimeter Group, writes that marketing personalization is now so expected by consumers that it has become the status quo. So, to get ahead, brands must move past it to “extreme personalization” or EP.
Those brands that deliver messages catered to every real-time detail the customer is living, including where they are, their real-time schedules, their interests, their behaviors, and even what the weather is like, will survive in the context of today’s consumer expectations. And, the key to delivering, he says, is artificial intelligence (AI). AI can make one-to-one personalization possible in every customer engagement, even for Fortune 500 firms with millions of customers across the globe.
Extreme Personalization comes to our classrooms.
If EP can provide one-to-one personalization to millions of consumers, what would it look like in our children’s classrooms? With 52.9 million kindergarten to twelfth-grade (K-12) public and private school students in the United States (US) and a mere 3.6 million teachers by comparison, many business professionals are exploring how the same AI that brings EP to the consumer can offer the same “extreme personalization” at scale to our nation’s children.
“From the end user perspective, one of the challenges is that everything is static. It doesn’t matter what age group it is or what I’m learning…as an end user right now, I’m stuck with what there is and I have to interpret it to my needs,” says Mernaz Masuomi, Truedge AI’s chief strategy officer and advisory board member.
Similar to the marketing world, she says AI is a game changer. “AI can be trained to teach directly based on users’ requirements, the way that they learn.” So, how far can we take this? In an effort to clarify exactly how revolutionary AI can be in our school systems, I talked to AI tech professionals working to create more targeted learning experiences for our children. Here are 5 ways AI is poised to revolutionize our school systems from those who are doing it:
- Teaching Personalized to Learning Styles and Speeds
Brian Solis explains that AI allows marketers to move from segmenting customers based on broad characteristics — like location, gender, income, age, education level, and more — to an audience of one. Mass email marketing, for example, can go from one message sent to hundreds of thousands of similar customers to automating something like this:
Dear David,
We’re reaching out to thank you for your business. To do so, based on your interest in beach sports, the excessively warm Texas weather you’re experiencing, and your budget, we’ve prepared to offer you a catered deal on water skis to go along with your recent speed boat purchase.
~ AB Brand
Mernaz explains that Truedge AI works to transfer this EP to create a similar audience-of-one learning experience. “By taking all of the data of how children learn across the board — all their scores, immediate feedback from educators, the results of everything they’ve worked on thus far — and plugging it into the AI system, the system then turns around and creates a curriculum of what that child should be studying or reading to help them progress,” she says. And it does so instantly to keep up with and ahead of children’s progress as they’re learning.
Larry S. Kirsch, senior vice president and general manager state, local, and education at PCM-G, a Fortune 1000 IT solutions provider, envisions what this might look like in the future: “One day, students may have a Personal Education Assistant Pal (PEAP) assigned to them,” he says. “This PEAP will carry the student’s historical academic record, as well as input from teachers. Curriculum recommendations and learning aids that target the exact differentiation needed for each child is now possible based on hard data and not limited information.” We’re not talking about the distant-future here. According to him, though not currently on the market, this AI capability already exists.
2. Better Time Management for High-Quality 1:1 Student-Teacher Interactions
It used to be that, to find the best personalized email, email marketers would test subject lines, content, and layout on a time-inefficient trial-and-error basis to find the best performing one. Now, with automated AI, all of this can be done in seconds, creating a personalized email for each person based on their past behaviors, interests, and more. The result is time more efficiently spent by email marketers and more successful customer relationships.
In a similar progression, today, teachers apply the same curriculum to each student with very little variation. And, inevitably, some students fall behind. Ideally, teachers are trained to test different methods to help struggling students absorb information better. But, as teachers increasingly manage 30-student classrooms, it is difficult to spend time on each child to help them succeed.
In this context, the patented A2i Professional Support System by Learning Ovations, Inc. can collect data on contributing factors to children’s in-class success, analyze it, recommend best-teaching and learning practices, and then improve the delivery of individualized instruction to help all children learn more successfully.
Speaking about a client they’re helping to apply AI to this context, Mernaz explains, “With the help of AI, they are analyzing why certain students read faster and more successfully. And then they come up with a unified way of training those who are struggling.” She says the AI algorithm uses research-based protocols to access open source activities and recommend them to multiple environments beyond the schools where children’s’ learning takes place: home, after-school activities, summer enrichment programs, and more.
Next, AI can help students and educators with outside-classroom tasks to create more efficient in-class time usage. Alexey Dolinskiy, founder and head of University relations at Coursalytics and MIPT adjunct professor of analytics at Coursera, says “by answering simple questions about class requirements, useful readings and home assignments, [an AI-powered] chatbot would save the professor time and ensure better preparation of class-takers.” Chatbots can serve the same purpose in a K-12 classroom, ensuring students come prepared and teachers waste little in-class time answering questions the chatbot already has.
The result: custom student preparation and teachers better able to walk alongside students despite time constraints.
3. Personalized In-School Nutrition to Maximize Student Performance
Whether it’s baseball, basketball, or football season, every day we see mega-sports performers on our TVs, in our newspapers, and on our digital screens. To maximize game performance, personal trainers man these athletes’ nutrition programs to account for activity levels, health, fitness goals, and cognitive needs. “Everything to the last of what’s going into their meals is covered to maximize results, to create the perfect athlete,” says Mernaz.
We already know that personalized nutrition powers world-class performances. So, why wouldn’t we apply this knowledge to our school children? Mernaz says, historically, “we couldn’t do that. We didn’t have the data. We didn’t have enough information for everybody to do that. Does that mean it’s right? Absolutely not.” She goes on to expel their plan to make it happen.
Truedge AI is looking to created an AI system that looks at bio-measurements derived from child wearable devices like blood pressure, heartbeat, oxygen levels, and more. Then, it will look at the child’s consumption needs for long-term health, his or her fitness levels, and any health feedback from physicians.
From there, it creates a highly detailed personalized nutritional program. “We’re creating a personalized nutrition program for every child just the way super athletes get the perfect nutrition for their requirements to maximize their performance,” she says.
In the end, Mernaz says Truedge AI plans to tap into a program that provides food to school children based on parents’ request. “So, then, based on all of the information from each kid and their nutrition, it will design daily nutrition to deliver to them,” says Mernaz, and all powered and automated by AI.
But, that’s not all. It will also look at the child’s tasks and daily schedules to determine when she needs snacks for best performance. If the AI algorithm determines a child needs a snack before a test for optimal performance, it will notify the child’s educator and offer a snack recommendation at the optimal time for peak performance come test time.
4. Instant Quality-Information for Students
Students benefit from receiving information from educators in two contexts. First, of course, is the teaching process. Historically, teachers have been the source of information for K-12 students. Second is the feedback process. When a student takes a test, he gets feedback on his performance and how to improve. This feedback also comes from human educators.
But, this is about to shift. And, students are the beneficiaries.
“A modern instructor is helping learners acquire new knowledge and skills by guiding them to the right bits of information that would be most useful to them,” says Alexey. He says all the information students need is already out there (and is being created daily) in the form of books, articles, online lectures, and even TED talks, where students can access some of the greatest minds in history — think Stephen Hawking!
He goes on: “A well-written chatbot can help match learning needs with the right source of information just as instructors do.” This means the epitome of personalization. Students may be struggling and so can be automatically assigned content to fill gaps. Teachers may not be available on a one-on-one basis to find catered content to each student’s progress needs, but AI can.
Next, Mernaz says the current feedback process is broken. “Right now, going through K-12, you teach me to read, I read, I take a test, and I get feedback. That’s a very long process.” She says AI can reduce the feedback loop and create a more effective learning process by giving students instant access to feedback information as they learn. Instant correction means students learn concepts the right way the first time, eliminating the need to unlearn and relearn.
5. Equal Access to High Quality Education.
In interviewing thought leaders on the role AI will soon play in our school systems, a recurring theme emerged: “Because AI won’t distribute caring human attention equally, it will only contribute to greater inequalities, with the children of wealthy parents getting the best combinations of AI and good teachers, while others don’t,” says Kentaro Toyama, W.K. Kellog Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
He says that AI only amplifies humanity and so has the potential to create greater inequality. Schools that can afford greater technology toolkits and the best mix of human and AI will attract children from the higher socioeconomic rungs, leaving the rest further behind than ever.
Others point out that unequal access to quality education is not new and is only worsening. And, AI can help us address this. “Right now, some children are ahead while others are behind. Their parents can afford tutors while others cannot. With the help of AI, we can find out how it is that some students are more successful and some students are not and we can start creating a uniform system. In the future, AI is providing a wonderful tool to actually make sure nobody’s neglected,” says Mernaz.
In addition, as we’ve seen, by freeing educators from time-consuming busy work, helping them to better identify the source of students’ struggles, and providing instant teaching aids for each child’s needs, AI brings EP to schools with budgets unable to offer smaller student-to-teacher ratio gaps.
The Takeaway — AI Means Quality Learning Personalized to the K-12 Masses
AI-powered extreme personalization offers us a path to prepare millions of US students for job success by helping them to overcome the unique challenges standing in their way. In the classroom, this means one-to-one student-teacher relationships, teaching catered to learning styles and speeds, quality information instantly delivered to students when and where they need it, personalize student nutrition to maximize school performance, and equal access to the best education we have to offer across the board.
In the retail marketing world, we knew we could do better than templated emails sent out to the masses. In fact, adult consumers demanded it by giving their dollars to those brands that offered increasingly personalized marketing and services. Our children may not be able to demand it, but after perfecting extreme personalization in the adult world, we can now give it for a brighter future for our children.
