Will new AI tutors make skills easier to learn?
July 13, 2023
Since the release of Chat GPT, many companies are wondering how AI will transform the way they do business. One hope is that AI will free workers from repetitive tasks and increase productivity. But AI may also change how the workforce learns new skills. It may make advanced skills more accessible than ever.
For years, AI has automated administrative and clerical tasks performed by teachers, giving more time for instructional design and relationships. And businesses have used AI in employee training and development for tasks like identifying skills gaps and selecting trainings for individual growth paths.
But AI tutors may be a gamechanger. Universities and ed-tech organizations have started piloting generative-AI tutors, designed to help learners discover answers, complete projects, and delve into topics more deeply. Some new AI tutors are also designed to give students encouragement and support them emotionally, even by offering relationship advice.
Though generative-AI tutors are still developing, they hold out hope that personalized learning—in which each learner receives instruction suited to their individual background and needs—may finally be scaled up, as MOOCs made scaling up world-class courses possible over a decade ago.
Personalized learning on a massive scale is especially attractive for workforce development. By 2030, global economies could be facing a shortage of 85 million skilled workers. If AI tutors prove effective and accessible, they could help to reduce that shortage by enabling more people to succeed in learning in-demand skills.
Generative-AI tutors show promise for scaling-up personalized learning
In its coverage of the 2023 ASU+GSV Summit, among the largest ed-tech conferences in the world, Forbes reported that leaders in ed-tech and AI—including Sam Altman of Open AI and Bill Gates—are optimistic that generative AI will spark a revolution in personalized learning.
According to Forbes, Gates believes that generative AI could even promote basic literacy, by providing each student with a personal tutor who could give instant feedback. And Altman observed that, already, Chat GPT gives learners the specific information they need in easy-to-read language, thus already serving as a personal tutor.
There is evidence that Altman is right. In May 2023, Intelligent.com surveyed 3,017 high-school and college students, as well as 3,234 parents of younger students, about study habits. The survey found that 10% of high-school and college students and 15% of school-aged children studied with Chat GPT over the last year. But most surprisingly, nearly all students who had been consulting a human tutor replaced at least some of their human-tutor sessions with Chat GPT, and 9 out of 10 students preferred Chat GPT over a human tutor.
Despite these surprising results, a higher-ed consultant with Intelligent.com, Diane Gayeski, warned, “Most tutors do much more than provide content—they structure study time, they provide modeling and motivation, and they help diagnose where learners are having trouble and can then structure the explanations and practice to overcome those obstacles.”
But these supports—structuring study time, modeling, motivating, and discovering why a student is struggling—may be offered by the newest generative-AI tutors.
Khanmigo: A forerunner in the AI-tutoring race
Perhaps no generative-AI tutor has been better publicized than Khan Academy’s chatbot Khanmigo (a portmanteau of “Khan” and “amigo”). Using Open AI’s large language model GPT-4, Khanmigo offers tutoring for subjects ranging from grade-school history to college-level organic chemistry. It helps students solve math problems, co-writes stories, debates, and impersonates historical figures.
In an interview with CNN, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, claimed that Khanmigo does not “allow you to cheat” and uses the Socratic method to lead students to answers without giving them away.
“It acts like Aristotle or Socrates would,” claimed Khan.
It’s unclear how well Khanmigo lives up to these claims. According to The New York Times, Khanmigo immediately gave students the solution to a math problem as a reporter looked on. A student typed the question into the chatbot: “What fraction of the letters in the word MATHEMATICIAN are consonants?” The bot responded: “7/13.” Elsewhere, another student asked Khanmigo to explain how it solved a problem, and the bot made a basic arithmetic error, miscalculating the result of “19 + 12.” But these may just be kinks.
As of June 2023, Khanmigo was still being piloted at the Khan Lab School—a private K-12 school with an annual tuition of more than $30,000 in Silicon Valley—and at least one public school in Newark, NJ. To pilot Khanmigo, the Newark school paid a reported annual fee of $10 per student. That price will increase to $60 per student in the upcoming school year.
Such costs raise questions about whether Khanmigo, or any AI Tutor, can be expected to fulfill the promise of democratizing personalized education soon.
Other recently released and in-development AI tutors
Harvard recently announced that its well-known introductory computer science course CS50 will have its own AI tutor, also developed with large language models created by Open AI. The CS50 tutor will help students to find bugs, interpret errors, answer specific questions, and give feedback on design.
A private ed-tech company, Loora, has developed a generative-AI tutor for English language learning. According to a recent press release, Loora “offers the experience of naturally conversing with a native English speaker, on-demand, on any topic, with real-time feedback, all at an affordable cost, eliminating major barriers to achieving fluency.”
Researchers at Columbia University have developed and begun testing of an AI writing tutor called Scraft. Like Khan, the developers of Scraft, Tae Wook Kim and Quan Tan, claimed that it “asks Socratic questions to users and encourages critical thinking.” But they also found that its feedback is “sometimes factually incorrect and lacks context.”
Another AI tutor, Avatar Buddy, was released in Jan. 2023. Avatar Buddy, like Khanmigo, appears to offer tutoring on a wide range of subjects, from math and geometry to Shakespeare. According to cofounder of Avatar Buddy Stephanie Sylvestre, the AI tutor has also been designed to offer students “emotional support.” At least one student who has participated in testing of Avatar Buddy has used it to help resolve disagreements with a girlfriend.
An investment in AI for adult learning
While most AI tutors focus on helping students in K-12 and college, advancements in adult learning may be coming soon.
Georgia Tech has been an early leader in AI in education. Most famously, Georgia Tech professor Ashok K. Goel developed an AI teaching assistant called Jill Watson in 2016, an assistant that could answer students course-related questions at any time.
More recently, a new institute led by Georgia Tech, the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE), is being established with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to “develop an AI-Based transformative model of online adult learning.”
“AI-ALOE will lead the country and the world in the development of novel AI theories and techniques for enhancing the quality of adult online education,” according AI-ALOE’s website. The institute aims “to make education more available, affordable, achievable, and ultimately, more equitable.”
AI-ALOE may provided much needed development of AI tutoring for adult learners who seek upskilling and reskilling.
Whether the newest generations of AI will finally make personalized learning accessible across the globe remains to be seen. Researchers have been dreaming up machines that offer automated personalized instruction since at least 1924, according to Aubrey Watters’ book Teaching Machines. Still, after a century, no machine or AI has been able to replace a human teacher or tutor. Maybe generative AI will be different.
Still, generative AI can only make a difference where it’s available. As much as two-thirds of all school-aged children in the world do not have internet access, according to UNESCO. For much of the world, not a lack of personal tutors but a lack of basic infrastructure remains the primary obstacle to learning.
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