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Dec 11, 2023|White Papers

Using Artificial Intelligence In Distance Learning Programs

About This Paper

This whitepaper discusses about using AI in education sector and the challenges being faced by Universities and Academic institutions that offer distance learning programs to students.

Further, it suggests how these challenges can be addressed by creating and training one or more proxies with data from the subject matter expertise of respective faculty. These trained proxies of respective faculty can be accessed through a natural language interface by the students who enroll into courses offered by the institution.

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence in the field of Education could play a crucial role in facilitating adaptive learning, understanding student behavior, performing mundane administrative tasks and automating student grading systems, etc..

Further, AI can be used to create and deploy virtual facilitators or conversational agents or chatbots to bring conceptual clarity on certain subject topics 24×7.

A research report published in EdTech magazine in 2017 projected that AI usage in the Education sector is likely to grow exponentially at 47.5 percent through 2021.

Advantages of Using AI in Education

In a research study, it has been observed that using AI in Education has benefited all the stake-holders including students, faculty and institution:

  • Personalized learning is helping students in clearly understandingsubject concepts.
  • Automating the repetitive tasks done by teachers, like students homework and performance evaluation, is helping them to concentrate on other important tasks that could improve learning outcomes.
  • Students learning patterns can be better analyzed. By using the student data, AI helps in designing specific courses according to students learning pace and instructional approach.
  • AI-powered chatbots can convert the textbooks into digital content that can be accessed from any device, anywhere and at anytime. This
    digital content can be accessed 24×7 by students and thereby, making the learning process simple and easy.
  • AI can provide personalized feedback and also automate students grading system.
  • AI-powered chatbots can help in improving the interaction between the learners / students and academicians.
  • AI-powered chatbots or virtual tutors offer great potential in online learning to help students in problem-solving, answering questions and clarifying doubts. AI makes online learning more qualitative and transparent.

While there are several advantages of using AI in education sector, we focus on specific challenges in distance learning programs and how AI-powered proxies could address them.

Challenges of Running Distance Learning Programs

Some of the challenges faced by Universities and Academic institutions while launching distance learning programs are:

  • Students (enrollees) attrition rate: Because there is no access to faculty at the time of need while studying a course, students typically feel lost in understanding the concepts being presented in the study material. They look for guidance or support from a faculty to clarify doubts or better explain the concepts, which cannot be provided 24×7.
  • Scheduling conflicts or limited availability of faculty: Most of the distance learning programs have faculty who are drawn from the regular classroom courses. This adds to the complexity of managing the schedules of the faculty in providing one-to-one sessions with the student – if one is offered by the institution offering distance learning programs.
  • More faculty members need to be allocated than required: To offset the issue of addressing the learning needs of long distance students, most of the institutions hire more faculty than needed to reduce the turn-around time for providing responses to questions from students in their time of need.
  • Assessments: Assessing students at regular intervals and giving them individual feedback to further their understanding of the subject needs a considerable amount of the respective faculty’s time. As more students get enrolled in a distance learning program, more will be the demand for the faculty’s time to assess each student individually – so that the learning outcomes from distance learning programs are on par with regular classroom courses.
Using Our Product to Train and Deploy Proxies

We build and host scaleable, budget-friendly proxies (chatbots, virtual assistants and enterprise search applications) that can be seamlessly deployed either on the organization «s website or Learning Mangement Systems (LMS) like Moodle or Content Management Systems (CMS) like Joomla, WordPress etc..

Initially a virtual assistant can be trained on one course and deployed for 24×7 access to students. Later, it can be trained to include all the courses in a department or all other departments. Further, it can be trained to conduct scheduled assessments and generate grading reports post-assessment of the students.

For a demo of how a trained Virtual Assistant provides responses (in another industry sector) Click Here.

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