Updated November 09, 2017 07:14:45 Schools must urgently adapt to confront the enormous challenges presented by artificial intelligence, according to leading educators who are calling for an overhaul to curriculum, assessment and teaching methods. Australia is hosting international experts on education and AI at a symposium that will be attended by teachers from around the country. One of the guest speakers is Rose Luckin, a professor at University College London, who believes AI could transform education by freeing teachers from mundane administration and assessment tasks. She said it would allow teachers to focus on what she describes as "meta-level skills" in which students developed high levels of self-knowledge of their own abilities and skills — a quality that is very difficult for computers to emulate. "We need to review what and how we teach and ensure that AI is designed and used as a tool to make our students [and ourselves] smarter, not as a technology that takes over human roles and dumbs us down," Professor Luckin says. "It's not just STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] subjects. There does need to be quite a significant shift in emphasis away from purely what I would call routine cognitive processing." The symposium will also hear from Washington-based Marc Tucker from the United States' National Centre on Education and the Economy. He believes there is an urgent need to "reconceive schooling" all around the world to ensure the future workforce is not consigned to joblessness. "Students will need strong cognitive skills, much deeper knowledge and much more sophisticated skills, if they are going to be partners to increasingly intelligent agents and not put out of work by them," the abstract for Mr Tucker's paper to be delivered at the symposium says. "And they will need to be very strong where the intelligent agents are, at least for the time being, relatively weak: in areas like creativity (and) imagination." The NSW Education Department has been consulting intensively with experts in AI in recent months to understand how schools must adapt, department deputy secretary Leslie Loble said. "This symposium is the start of ongoing work that we hope will prompt a national debate and an ongoing dialogue with our teachers, with our students, with our parents, with communities and employers, about how NSW and Australia can have the education that counts," Ms Loble said. "In 2030, when today's kindergartner leaves high school, the world will look quite different. AI will certainly be an embedded feature. "We feel there is an urgency to tackle education changes so that that child leaves schooling armed with the knowledge and the skills, the capabilities and the confidence to shape their world and, if you're talking about AI, to ensure that the machines serve human purposes." There is widespread agreement among experts that the basics of schooling remain the same: a solid foundation in reading, writing and arithmetic and strong subject knowledge. But those skills will not be enough to safeguard the future of jobs. Empathy, a global outlook, critical and reflective thinking, adaptability and the willingness to be a lifelong learner will be key to navigating the world of AI. But there are also calls for the way students are assessed to be overhauled. Professor Luckin argues traditional ways of assessing students are "no longer fit for purpose". "The current outdated assessment systems that prevail across the world revolve around testing and examining the routine cognitive subject knowledge that can be easily automated," Professor Luckin says. "These assessment systems are ineffective, time-consuming and the cause of great anxiety for learners, parents and teachers." And she may have found an ally in NSW education department head Mark Scott, who says in a book that will be published at today's symposium that assessment methods should become sophisticated. "We need to move away from the single point in time measurement approach to testing and towards a more dynamic form of assessment that gives teachers flows of insight where progress can be regularly and objectively mapped," Mr Scott writes in the book Future Frontiers: Education for an AI World. "This will allow assessment to become more diagnostic, as in medicine, to allow teachers to more easily identify and address individual student needs." The Director of the 3A Institute at the Australian National University, Professor Genevieve Bell, will also appear on an expert panel at the symposium. She agrees there is an urgent need to examine the way schools are adapting to AI. "I do think we're at an interesting intersection where a lot of the things we've been talking about in some cases for 60 years are now achieving maturity. Artificial intelligence is one of those," she said. "And so we're at a moment in time where we do need to be thinking about how do we equip students, but also ourselves, to handle that world." Topics: government-and-politics, information-technology, science-and-technology, education, australia First posted November 09, 2017 06:00:52
An overhaul of the educational system is necessary if schools are to overcome the challenges AI poses to the future workforce, according to leading educators. Marc Tucker, of University College London, argues for the need to "review what and how we teach and ensure that AI is designed and used as a tool to make our students smarter". Rose Luckin, from the US National Centre on Education and the Economy, warns that students "will need to be very strong where the intelligent agents are, at least for the time being, relatively weak: in areas like creativity (and) imagination."