A London school’s AI-powered teaching trial highlights both the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in education
Britain’s first teacherless AI classroom may be an “outlier”, but it underlines the potential benefits and risks of a UK government drive to rollout artificial intelligence in education, experts say.
David Game College, a private school in central London, is nearly six months into a trial in which students are taught core curriculum subjects for the GCSE state exams sat by 16-year-olds by AI platforms.
“Teaching and education will be transformed by AI. There is no doubt about that, and AI is not going to go away,” said co-principal John Dalton, urging people to become “agile and adopt it”.
The AI systems “monitor” how the students respond to course material and provide the school with “feedback information about their learning habits”, he explained.
The pilot, which currently has seven students and plans to have one coach for them, is a “leap of faith”, Dalton admitted.
Dalton, a biology teacher, told AFP the AI platforms can assess a student’s knowledge “with a greater degree of accuracy than your average teacher” to enable more personalised teaching. “I believe that AI will augment and it will change the role of teachers,” he said.
However, Rose Luckin, a professor at University College London (UCL) who researches AI in education, said AI was an “outlier” with an uncertain future in British classrooms. She also highlighted concerns about unequal access to technology and data infrastructure. “We need to learn from these examples, but I don’t see it as being representative of the future for everyone.”
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