Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you answer the question from the point of view of artificial intelligence in online education?

Ann Marie Sastry: In terms of AI in education, there’s a tension right now. It’s palpable. There is one camp that believes that AI can teach a human being effectively. There’s another camp that decries the lack of humanism in that interaction.

I’m in the second camp. I believe that engagement with other human beings is necessary. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Technology can allow you to do a thing but can’t tell you what thing to do.

The best use of technology is to augment that engagement among humans, but not to deliver question after question or content after content until someone has established that they’ve achieved mastery. Real learning and durable learning is done in conversation. That tension is going to be displayed in different solutions that come about globally.

I have listened to talks and I have seen people demonstrate platforms that are meant to auto-teach. I have seen pictures of students sitting in cubicles staring at screens with a person simply walking around a room looking in to make sure that the children are still watching their screens.

I don’t happen to believe that’s healthy. I think that exploration is healthy. I think that engagement is healthy. The best use of the technology is to support that engagement, however it occurs.

I also think that when you think about talent and where the teachers and learners are, we have an enormous wealth gap in the United States and in most industrialized nations. The United States is growing at an alarming pace.

Access to education is one of the issues of our time. Any time you do something to allow excellent teachers and coaches to connect with learners, that is a step towards correcting that lack of opportunity. Online, to me, is a huge white space. AI is a huge player in this because AI can take away a lot of the work that makes it impossible to scale talented teaching.

For example, you have a thousand people in the country who are intimately familiar with one disciplinary area. Will those thousand people who may be accountable because of economic growth and workforce demand be capable of training a million people using traditional methods? Of course not.

But can they conduct discussion groups? If the questions are curated and chunked for them, it solves the responsibility of grading a million papers but maybe assisted by AI. Can they expand their reach? Of course they can.

To me, that’s the better use of the technology. You’ll continue to see this tension and this idea that we can park kids or learners in front of a computer without human interaction. I don’t think that’s a good solution.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry
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