By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, its role in education is becoming increasingly significant, offering new opportunities to improve student success and make tutoring accessible to all. Nhon Ma, co-founder and CEO of the education technology company Numerade, says that AI has the potential to be a powerful tool that can help reverse the declining academic performance of students, particularly in STEM subjects.
“We see AI having a tremendous impact on education, mainly around getting students to a place where they need to be. Over the past decade, we have seen a decline in terms of academic achievement, specifically in the STEM field,” said Ma. “So, we see AI having this potential of bringing students back to the forefront of their scores.”
For many, the growing presence of AI raises concerns about job displacement and the fear of machines taking over. However, when it comes to education, Ma believes that human teachers will continue to play an essential role in education.
“We do believe that teachers will still be here; you need humans in the loop to inspire students and to help students learn difficult concepts,” Ma said. “AI will actually help reduce a lot of manual tasks, anywhere from lesson grading to lesson creation. And AI will be used to then model those tasks where teachers can now have more of a one-on-one relationship with each of their students to help drive in more critical thinking and understanding on a high level.”
According to Ma, one of the biggest advantages of AI is that it can provide tutoring support at little or no cost to students who otherwise could not afford it.
“The reality is that the vast majority of Americans can’t afford a tutor, and the promise of AI allows for every single student to get access to these AI tutors, either for a very low cost or free,” said Ma. “Having an AI tutor that understands all can get the student to the next stage of learning.”
To create a balance between traditional education methods and AI-powered learning, Ma said that the key focus should be on how students are being taught, ensuring that both approaches are integrated into the use of AI in education.
“Students learn in very different ways, and the traditional mode of learning hasn’t really changed. Some students are visual learners or auditory learners. AI has this ability to where we can provide students with both an educator and tutorials of understanding certain topics combined with each of the different types of learning,” said Ma. “AI can deliver the content in different instructional ways, and that is actually important to deepen the learning process.”
“Students who are behind can actually catch up faster because they’re able to have personalized teaching that suits them the way they learn best as well. So, it’s both content instruction and the delivery of this content to the student,” Ma continued.
Although AI could bring significant benefits to the education system, Ma said that it’s still important to recognize the potential drawbacks.
“The downside of AI is really the integrity aspect. Students can put a problem into the chat box, and it will just spit out an answer,” Ma said. “AI doesn’t always allow students to understand what is happening. A lot of AI that is out there is trained on data, but what we do is provide a Socratic approach format, where students are learning from human-created video tutorials.”
“Overall, there needs to be a policy safeguarding AI so kids aren’t just getting answers or having AI write essays for them,” Ma added.
Even with those concerns, Ma believes AI has the potential to transform education and expand access to tutoring worldwide.
“We want students to be inspired by the material, go deeper, but also challenge them to develop these critical thinking skills,” said Ma. “We created this company with the mission to ensure that every single student across the world has access to the benefits of tutoring, and now with AI technologies, it is possible.”
