Recently, the 5th China Artificial Intelligence Conference was held in Qingdao in 2019. Top experts in the field of artificial intelligence at home and abroad gathered together and conducted a new round of thinking collision and brainstorming. Artificial intelligence technology has gradually penetrated into various industries, bringing changes to human society and economic development, and leading the changes of people’s production, life and learning methods. At the end of last month, UNESCO officially released the Beijing Consensus — — Artificial Intelligence and Education ",proposes that all countries should formulate corresponding policies and explore effective strategies and practices of using artificial intelligence to promote educational innovation.
China is a big country in the application of artificial intelligence education. What kind of new collision will happen when the hot artificial intelligence meets the education that the whole people pay attention to? Not long ago, the "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Deepening the Reform of Education and Teaching and Improving the Quality of Compulsory Education in an All-round Way" clearly stated: "Promote the integration and application of information technology and education and teaching". To some extent, it can be seen that artificial intelligence education has entered the top design, which will bring changes to the ecology of traditional education.
In this context, which direction is China’s artificial intelligence education technology going? Have you made enough preparations? What are the remaining problems? These are all questions worth discussing.
All parties actively promoted the development of artificial intelligence education.
In recent years, "promoting the deep integration of artificial intelligence and education and promoting educational reform and innovation" has become a high-frequency official statement about artificial intelligence education.
"Artificial intelligence technology is affecting education from the dimensions of education ecology, education environment, education mode, education management mode and teacher-student relationship," said Gu Mingyuan, honorary president of China Education Association and a senior professor at Beijing Normal University. "With the deepening integration of information technology such as artificial intelligence and big data with classroom teaching, personalized learning and burden reduction and efficiency improvement have been realized."
In 2017, the State Council issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan", which explicitly deployed intelligent education as an important application field to promote the construction of intelligent society. It has become a broad consensus of the whole society to use artificial intelligence technology to meet the development needs of educational modernization and promote the reform and innovation of educational organization form and management mode.
The academic point of view is that artificial intelligence can solve educational problems at three levels, namely, compensatory education for special people, alternative education for routine business and adaptive education for service personality development.
Hong Wen, vice president of Yuanpei Education Science Research Institute, said that most people in China have realized the profound impact of artificial intelligence on education. From the government to enterprises, they are actively promoting the deep integration of artificial intelligence and education, promoting educational reform and innovation, and giving full play to the advantages of artificial intelligence. He believes that the in-depth development of artificial intelligence education technology can largely solve the multi-dimensional problems of uneven education, shortage of teachers, excessive teaching burden and insufficient learning efficiency. The current situation of artificial intelligence education in China can be summed up in eight words: "broad prospects and numerous followers".
There are many hidden worries behind the grand scene, and data is a big problem.
Artificial intelligence is booming in the field of education. According to statistics, the number and amount of financing in the field of artificial intelligence education in China have ranked first in the world in the past year, and the industry has made breakthrough progress in technology research and development and industrial application. It seems that everything about artificial intelligence and education seems optimistic. However, in the real world, things have never been so simple.
For artificial intelligence, in order to achieve the design goal, AI first needs to solve a problem, that is, data. Data must be entered into the algorithm so that it can "learn" the environment and determine which results are "good" and "bad".
At present, it is a recognized problem that there is a serious shortage of data reserves in China’s education industry. Compared with other artificial intelligence application industries such as finance, medical care, manufacturing, etc., the single data type, limited data scale and insufficient real validity of data in the education industry are the bottlenecks in the development of artificial intelligence education. Artificial intelligence relies on huge data support. To achieve the deep integration of artificial intelligence and education, multi-dimensional and massive educational data storage is particularly important, which requires not only structured data including students’ grades, attendance records, course plans, homework and comments, but also unstructured data that can reflect students’ learning behavior and teachers’ teaching process. At the same time, how to deeply analyze and understand data is also a big problem. Compared with other fields, it is difficult to restore the actual process of education simply by relying on big data.
"Because the education level of each place and the acceptance level of children are very different, in order to truly teach students in accordance with their aptitude, we must carry out a series of processes such as truly restoring the learning trajectory, accurately recording the learning process, and helping students to maximize their potential through AI classroom technology tools." Wang Wei, president of the Smart Education Division of Good Future Group, said.
Hong Wen also said that the whole data of students’ learning currently being used in China’s artificial intelligence education industry is indeed uneven. It seems that there is a huge amount of data, but there are many problems in careful analysis. On the one hand, the data is outdated or unreliable, on the other hand, there is no communication and communication between the data, resulting in closure. He believes that in order to develop the industry, we must first solve the data problem in order to make the model more accurate and learn more effectively.
Only after education can we be intelligent, and we still need to build up basic research.
It is a challenge and a new attempt for all employees that artificial intelligence promotes individualized learning of education from theoretical research to practice. Which way should the technical direction go? What research is essential? People in the industry have their own opinions. As far as the research focus is concerned, artificial intelligence education at home and abroad has shown different directions at present.
Foreign research on artificial intelligence education mainly focuses on big data, robotics, deep learning and so on. Domestic research on artificial intelligence education mainly focuses on natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and so on. It is worth mentioning that the United States and other countries have made great efforts in pedagogy, psychology, emotional education and cognitive research, and achieved certain results. However, these basic studies are still blank in China.
Because human emotions are very rich, and learning is a complex process, students will have complex and changeable emotions such as boredom, pleasure, depression and fear in the process of learning. How to know students’ emotions in time, effectively grasp students’ emotions and give corresponding emotional guidance by artificial intelligence technology is an important link in emotional education, and it is also an urgent problem to be solved in the application of artificial intelligence education. Huang Yan, CTO of Good Future Group and President of Open Platform Division, believes that in the long run, artificial intelligence needs to deepen the recognition and understanding of human emotions and emotions, and integrate with human brain science, cognitive science and psychology related theories. The research of these issues will have a far-reaching impact on the development of artificial intelligence education.
Strategic deployment is coming, creating a new ecology of smart education.
At the end of August, at the opening ceremony of the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced that on the basis of building five open innovation platforms in the early stage, 10 units were newly approved to build a new generation of national artificial intelligence open innovation platform, and wisdom education was among them. This shows that the country has great expectations for artificial intelligence to promote educational reform and innovation, and for promoting the deep integration and development of artificial intelligence and education.
It is understood that the construction of the national open innovation platform for smart education will meet the needs of education reform and innovation and the development of the education industry, and provide all participants in the industry with full-scenario, full-process and full-cycle smart education service support from technology, solutions to industrial applications. The open platform will be divided into three parts: smart education technology empowerment platform, smart education solution open platform and smart education industry open platform.
If the technology of artificial intelligence education is regarded as "the process of upgrading all the way", then the problems at the infrastructure level must be broken through by the whole industry. Only with it can we have the basic data of artificial intelligence education, such as students’ learning data, teaching resource data and teaching management data. The openness and sharing of these data make people have a clearer understanding of artificial intelligence+education.
Huang Yan said that as the contractor of the national new generation artificial intelligence open innovation platform for smart education, many technologies have been commercialized in the future. In the future, we will further build a community of knowledge sharing and experience exchange in the education industry, guide small and medium-sized enterprises and innovative entrepreneurs to carry out product research and development and application testing based on an open innovation platform, integrate resources in technology, industrial chain and finance, and create a new ecology of smart education. (Science and Technology Daily reporter Li Yan)