The recent surge in public interest in AI began with the release of DALL-E and ChatGPT from OpenAI. Since their release, there have been several AI powered applications developed. Witnessing these advancements, I wondered how it could transform the traditional form of education. Just a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon videos on YouTube which were about how Harvard's CS50 Course and Khan Academy were starting to use AI as Teaching Assistants for their courseware and here I want to talk about them.
CS50
CS50 is Harvard University's online introductory course on Computer Science. These courses are available on their YouTube channel. Recently one of the instructors showcased how they were using AI model ChatGPT to help students taking the course and that caught my attention. The two things they have introduced for students as well as teachers are:
cs50.ai
This is a Q&A chat model integrated which is trained on the contents of the course and students can ask questions to the chatbot and they will be able to get solutions to their doubts. The doubts is not only limited to theory but can also be used for doubts on code, and error messages. This chatbot has become a personal teaching assistant, replacing the presence of a teacher to answer students doubts outside class hours.
cs50.dev
It is basically Visual Studio customized for CS50 and on the browser. Students could type out their code and select a part of the code and ask the AI model integrated with it to explain the code and the student is able to get an explanation of each line of code.
The AI model can also help students improve their code style and formatting. The students just have to click on a button and can see how the coding style and formatting can be improved and with a click of another button they can have those changes in their code.
Khan Academy
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy in a TED talk spoke about how his company was using AI to help students. They are also using a chat model but with more advanced type of capabilities, called Khanmigo. They call this a student's personal tutor and teaching assistant.
Khanmigo, is a chatbot with the following features:
- When there is a problem statement given to a student, the student will not directly receive the answer of the problem but will be tutored by the bot on the steps to solve the problem
- For doubts related to coding quizzes on the platform, the student need not copy paste the code, but just ask Khanmigo their doubt and the chatbot will analyze the code on it's own and provide a solution
- The same applies to videos too, the chatbot understands the context of the video that the student is watching and is able to answer question about the same
- The chatbot can also act as an academic and career coach, and will help the student with questions about academics and their career choices.
These few use cases of AI in education, gets me excited on what the future holds for it. This is just the beginning and I am really curious to know how people will leverage this technology to make education fun.
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