
China has started a grand experiment in AI education - Errorcod3
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614057/china-squirrel-has-started-a-grand-experiment-in-ai-education-it-could-reshape-how-the/
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ckris
Of course I don't think you need AI for this. You just need something that is
slightly interactive so you can modify the learning path to be more efficient.
You could even do it with a book. That is the real win of adopting technology,
that it can change your mindset. Presumably that is also why the mindset
sometime come before the technology, with things like sci-fi. Unfortunately I
think in many markets people are focusing on just adopting technology, but not
the mindset. So you don't get all the benefits or even make things worse. You
get fancy proof of concepts that don't do much at scale.

~~~
newguy1234
I think the bigger problem is the overall influence that "traditional
learning" has on the mindset of the learner. In both the USA and China, you
can see what every young person's mindset is focused on - studying for that
big college entrance exam. Everything is simply a means to achieving a good
score on that exam.

Perhaps if we allowed kids to move away from that idea of the "big college
entrance exam" or similar we could dive into the deeper stuff like...what do
YOU want to be when you get older, what problems do YOU want to try to solve
and so on. If someone wants to work on video games then start pushing them
down that path as soon as possible...get them to learn coding, media design,
computer graphics and so on.

~~~
sidibe
> In both the USA and China, you can see what every young person's mindset is
> focused on - studying for that big college entrance exam. Everything is
> simply a means to achieving a good score on that exam.

This is less true in the USA than any other country I know of. The "college
entrance exam" is not nearly as decisive or as prepared for as in other
countries and most of the curriculum has nothing to do with it.

~~~
Vrondi
In the USA, we do not even use the same college entrance exam in all higher ed
systems. Different state systems use different exams, and then so does each
private college and university. There are several, and which you take (or you
may take several) depends where you are applying.

~~~
bobthepanda
It's also not one exam, in the sense that it gets held multiple times a year
and retaking it (if you're willing to pay for it) is possible and a lot of
people do it and submit their best scores.

The SAT & ACT are also mostly limited to the humanities and math (and science
for the ACT), with an optional writing section. China requires Math, Chinese,
a foreign language, and any three of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography,
Politics, and History. With the SAT all those elective subjects are separate
exams and most people do not take them.

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dr_dshiv
One problem with AI in education is that it promotes magical thinking. That
is, if you rationally understand what the AI is doing, it seems awfully
simple. And then the disappointment comes: if it is simple and understandable,
it isn't really AI.

That's why you see a race for obscurity -- lots of jargon to describe the
complexity of the system.

In reality, good educational software is about good design, good goal
alignment, good assessments, good sequencing, good intervention material --
it's all based on classic instructional design, not a superior algorithm. Has
the software been set up to support data driven continuous improvement? That
is more important than an algorithm.

~~~
scottlegrand2
I'm going to disagree here. I have enough understanding of AI to have built a
deep learning framework from first principles. That deep learning framework
makes a pile of money for Amazon to this day.

That I know how it works because I wrote the thing doesn't take away from the
miracle that it makes that kind of money for doing complicated but not all
that complicated stuff.

When I look at generative adversarial networks and the recent attention-based
language models I am similarly amazed at what they can do.

But I am also 100% aware of their limitations and I think the hype that they
are near-term AGI technology is the real magical thinking.

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ConfusedDog
I was in China few months ago. My general impression is that parents are crazy
generous toward their children's education. There are whole department store
building devoted to extra-curriculum classes for all different ages - and they
ain't cheap at all.

My impression of Squirrel AI is really just using more advanced analytics for
education, which is good in concept; but really they are selling parents' the
fear that "if you don't buy our services, your children WILL be left behind."

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bluetwo
Adaptive learning is great but you still need to develop content using
instructional design principles or else you can't adapt anything.

You can't just dump content in and hope for the best.

~~~
bitlax
What resources would you recommend that provide instructional design
principles?

~~~
kwooding
I'm guessing "instructional design" is referring to how you model the problem
domain being learned so that it's amenable to use with adaptive learning
systems?

Most research in this area is drawn from the domain of “Intelligent Tutoring
Systems,” (ITSs), thoroughly described in Woolf’s book “Building Intelligent
Interactive Tutors.” [WOOLFE2009].

I'd say the classic Intelligent Tutor System construction was pioneered by
ADVISOR [BWB2000]. It's a two-agent architecture that first trains a student
model on real-world data, then uses the student model to train a pedagogical
agent using a more resource intensive algorithm. Most modern ITSs make use of
Representation Learning (RL) to train the pedagogical agent.

One of the main techniques for structuring the problem domain is Bayesian
Knowledge Tracing (BKT) [CA1995], where you model the domain being learned as
a Bayesian skills network; i.e. a 4-tuple of probabilities (init, learning,
guess, slip), updated in a Bayesian fashion. An excellent survey work in this
area is given in [BGTPF2010].

If you're interested in the RL part of the problem, and how it can work with
this setup you might want to look into partially observable Markov decision
process — POMDPs. Emma Brunskill has done some nice work in this area.

[WOOLF2009]: Woolf, Beverly Park. 2009. Building Intelligent Interactive
Tutors: Student-Centered Strategies for Revolutionizing e-Learning. Amsterdam
; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier.

[BWB2000]: Beck, Joseph, Beverly Park Woolf, and Carole R. Beal. "ADVISOR: A
machine learning architecture for intelligent tutor construction." AAAI/IAAI
2000 (2000): 552-557.

[CA1995]: Corbett, Albert T., and John R. Anderson. "Knowledge tracing:
Modeling the acquisition of procedural knowledge." User modeling and user-
adapted interaction 4, no. 4 (1994): 253-278.

[BGTPF2010]: Brunskill, Emma, Sunil Garg, Clint Tseng, Joyojeet Pal, and Leah
Findlater. "Evaluating an adaptive multi-user educational tool for low-
resource environments." In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, pp.
13-16. 2010.

------
the8472
One step closer to "a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"

~~~
mncharity
But not much closer, if content, rather than delivery, is the pressing
bottleneck.

My experience has been, that of the _few_ first-tier astronomy graduate
students that aren't mistaken about the color of the Sun, as many learned it
in seminar coverage of common misconceptions in astronomy education, as
learned it in their own atypically extensive and successful astronomy
education. Current content is really, really bad. A "Primer" will require much
better.

AI doesn't help much if your large textbook publisher's science education
content is written by inexpensive liberal arts majors with no science
background, consulting with "scientists". If one instead uses science graduate
students, double majoring in education, with misconception lists in hand, you
might get that Sun color right. Maybe. And interviewing researchers about
their own research areas is even better. But...

Say you're writing a children's picture book about atoms. What magnitude of
domain expertise support do you need? How about a small room full of MIT
physics professors? Is that enough?

Can you see a bare atomic nucleus with your naked eye? Why not? Did you just
now say too small, rather than beyond-violet "color"? That much is easy. But
what if you wish to discover that a couple of atypical atomic nuclei _can_ be
seen with your room-lit naked eye, can be made to brightly fluoresce visibly
(a multi-step spin-isomer decay, with one step visible)? So you can include a
photo, of a glowing green dot in a vacuum vessel, in your picture book, to
reinforce that nuclei are real physical objects. My experience has been that a
room of MIT professors, most with some nuclear physics background, is likely
an insufficient gathering of expertise. Unless it's a lunch for a visiting
professor, whose focus is nucleus simulation, who self-describes their focus
as a (with emphasis) "small" subfield, and who perhaps thinks all this
obvious. Reflect on that: A room full of MIT physics professors is
insufficient domain expertise to write an excellent children's picture book
about atoms. How might we then go about writing a Primer, if it takes such an
awesome gathering of expertise?

Before Primers can be airdropped, they need to be written. And I suggest we're
not yet even at the point of recognizing and acknowledging the primary
challenge there, let alone scoping, funding, and addressing it. It's not
pedagogy and ed tech that's blocking the road to a Primer. It's the sciences.
And their incentives and funding.

It's something I'd love to be working on, but finding people to work with has
been a challenge.

~~~
newguy1234
Interesting idea and I completely agree. I have delved into my ed tech
projects and reached more or less the same conclusion - content is a
bottleneck. Now I don't know if your overall critique is correct but I think
the major thing we can agree on is this: we need high-quality source material
that is preferably free. I think the solution is something similar to
wikibooks (which I personally think is a failed project at this point) but it
needs to solve the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute
similar to how people contribute to wikipedia. Writing an article is easy for
a few people to do....but an entire book or curriculum for an entire
course...now that's a different story. I do think there is a solution to it
which is mainly just a hybrid approach of paying people to write the high-
level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it. If
that doesn't work then we simply need a funding mechanism to write open source
books.

Once we have these open source books then it becomes significantly easier to
build additional tools on top of that source material - exams, practice
questions, lecture videos, study notes etc.

Most of the ed tech players I see are simply developing tools that are trying
to fit into a broken system. Simply put - the current system needs to be
scrapped and replaced with something better, built with the internet in mind
and built to be a major disruptor of GLOBAL education.

I am currently working on a side project trying to bring it to MVP stage. This
is the idea I have in mind: Let's build a new platform that rebuilds education
for the 21st century - start with writing open source textbooks. At the
beginning, they don't need to be perfect, they can be revised as the platform
grows. Then build a bunch of innovative self-study type tools using the latest
in technology to make learning efficient, easy and fun. In terms of
monetization - simple advertising and premium services (tutoring, live
streamed classes with teachers etc.) and of course a simple credentialing
system with the possibly to have proctored exams to add validity. Long-term
vision would be this: a type 1 civilization university - all major subjects
would have a course with a free textbook and an amazing set of tools to self-
study it (or affordable options to get tutoring/view live streamed lectures
with real teachers). Add in localization tools to translate all of these
courses into the top 20+ languages. Each course would have a rigorousness
protected exam for students to get a employment worthy credential. Eliminate
all admission requirements and allow everyone to attend for free.

~~~
mncharity
> Writing an article is easy for a few people to do

Writing a _bad_ article is easy. And pervasive in science education.

I'm suggesting there's a level of excellence, at which even a small fragment
of an article, for any audience, takes a surprisingly large gathering of
expertise. So large as to be implausible with current
social/technical/incentive infrastructure. And I'm speculating that it's an
_interesting_ level of excellence, with benefits that might justify the
investment. Or at least the discussion of the possibility.

> write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit
> and revise it

I'm unsure how to describe why I don't buy this.

Imagine a draft newspaper article, which says "Foos do qux". The fact-checker
objects, "But some foos don't do qux". The reporter "fixes" the draft with "
_Most_ foos do qux". The newspaper fact-checker says "yes, that's great", and
it goes to press. Then someone who actually understands foos, points out to a
colleague, that the entire focus on qux was misguided, confusing, and
engenders misconceptions, and that indeed, the very concepts of foo and qux
are badly flawed. "It's news media - what do you expect?" the colleague
responds.

So there's a concept that you can wordsmith you way out of getting something
badly wrong. You've likely seen some process where two parties have profoundly
different concepts, but instead of discussing concepts, are engaged in text
tweaking.

But what if, in excellent content, even high-level organization is sensitive
to expertise-intensive details?

"Ok, for the foundational concept, we have proposals for atoms, a different
definition of atoms, molecules with atoms as a degenerate case, atoms in
molecules, nuclei, electron energy, electron clouds, configuration spaces,
trajectory spaces, ... . Let's explore the correctness, accessibility and
fruitfulness of each foundation." What if you can't even write a draft title,
let alone structure a presentation, until after a massive collaborative
process among educators, research scientists, and creative catalysts?

> the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute

An MIT project to create cell-biology VR content approached the need for
expertise by pulling in researchers for interviews about their areas. But
there was a reoccurring difficulty... getting the researchers to leave. Such
was their enthusiasm.

So I offer the hopeful possibility, that a project with just-the-right sweet-
spot shape, might accomplish things that seem impossibly difficult, when seen
less clearly.

> open source books

I'm sympathetic to OER. But in the context of transformative improvement...

Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using
adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both teachers and students
steeped in misconceptions. It's not clear to me that a reasonably scaled OER
effort can move that needle.

Years ago, NSF almost decided to create a national science education wiki,
analogous in scale to wikipedia. That might have had critical mass for
transformative change. But they didn't.

------
fitech
This article could be interesting, given the depth and breadth that one could
explore given the topic. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into fluff marketing
for the Chinese company they focus on. Is Technology Review accepting money
for articles?

~~~
knolax
Isn't Technology Review just some college newspaper? I've always found their
articles be at buzzfeed quality.

------
thatfrenchguy
> The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his
> test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%.

If you make having a high percentage at a standardised tests the point of
education and use software to make you drive those numbers up, negative
externalities are going to come back to you in a few decades in crazy ways...
And the article does note this: "Earlier this month, the government also
unveiled a set of guidelines to focus more on physical, moral, and artistic
education". How much that's going to be gamed as well is going to be
interesting I guess.

~~~
josinalvo
What negative externalities do you have in mind?

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mistrial9
anecdote, if you will.. in a major University setting, for natural sciences, a
mixed-level study-group is listening to a presentation on a model of a
forested ecosystem using remote sensing and "AI", though the emphasis was on
ML with certain inputs. An American with a liberal-arts background and good CS
training, asks "in this model, how can we find the limits of the validity of
these assumptions. A real world is more complex than what is being modeled, so
how can we describe that and find 'blind-spots' in the work here" ..
Meanwhile, a serious student who may have been born in China, asks "how can
the model results be cross-checked to eliminate human bias in the result
interpretation?"

Now this same exchange could have happened between any two students with the
basic alignments of "objective science" versus "natural sciences", but it did
seem telling of a certain pure-science tilt on the part of the student from
China. To push that further, one could say that the "objective science" angle
lacked a certain "intellectual humility" in the inquiry, with an emphasis on
the correctness of the machine results, and an assumption that better math
will produce "winning" output. No real evidence, but that was an impression at
that moment.

~~~
ckris
I think it has more to do with that China's strength at the moment is being
utilitarian. Their working theory is to increase capacity. That is why they
are build a lot of high speed rail, cities and power plants. While in the West
we talk about tweaking cars to being self-driving or interest rates in the
mortgage market. Because we don't really have that urgency to do things at
scale tomorrow.

------
mark_l_watson
Interesting article but I think this is really a broader topic: not just how
AI can transform tutoring/education but also how AI will impact all areas of
work, how human productivity and job satisfaction can be increased, and how we
will deal with “not enough work for people to do.”

~~~
newguy1234
The "not enough work for people" is mostly a myth from what I've seen. The
reality is rote work will be automated but higher-level type jobs will
increase. Also the idea of "basic income" will probably come indirectly - not
from a state funded program - but simply from cost of goods dropping so low
that buying the basics to live will be so cheap that you don't need much money
to begin with.

~~~
AstralStorm
Do you have actual numbers on this assertion? Preferably scaled to population?

~~~
newguy1234
I don't have the numbers. You would need to go to the history books to find it
but you can see the trend in action to a certain extent for certain
occupations. A prime example is farming. In aggregate, total employment in
farming has declined significantly. The people that are left are doing higher
level work, not tilling the field with a donkey and plow, they're driving a
tractor or doing soil analysis etc. The field laborers moved to cities and now
they do light manufacturing or similar jobs with maybe a few weeks of
training.

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ausjke
I foresee when more people get AI educated, the nation will be more likely to
have free speech and a real legal system, because there will be less people
easily get brainwashed that is, so this is good news.

~~~
Vrondi
Except that they will be brainwashed by the AI, in whatever direction the
authorities dictate.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Or simply the bias that the training data set (i.e. current curriculum) will
have.

------
ggggtez
There are us companies that do this too, on a limited scale. In my opinion,
there is no real reason you can't learn this way.

Teaching math this way is likely perfectly fine for middle school

------
qserasera
I'm really excited for ML analysis of education, problem solving, and
information retention on various pupils.

------
auslander
Year 2110. Citizen Interface is a mandatory implant into newborns brain.

------
JabavuAdams
The criticisms quoted in this article are rather poor. First the contention
that AI is better for rote tasks. Not true -- this is an old and outdated
view. Also the pooh-poohing of mere knowledge. You know, our democracies could
benefit from more people understanding statistics and/or chemistry. If you
understand first year physics + chemistry + biology + math + econ + psych, you
get a pretty useful model of how the world works. If you really get those
subjects, you're able to make all kinds of inferences and guesses that turn
out to be right surprisingly often.

As a game developer, I have a lot of exposure to the art-school types, and
it's amazing how poor their grasp is of how anything works, other than EDIT:
s/humans/human emotions/ and human-centric narrative.

~~~
kiba
I would contend that knowledge is better gained through slower, deeper
studies, not through rapid fire education for a single semester.

People may be taught physics and biology, but most of the knowledge will wash
through them once they finished their exams and got their grade.

~~~
newguy1234
The AI/self-study type platforms could possibly solve this problem since it
would allow the learner to progress at their own pace. I agree that "deeper
level study" is huge part of getting the bigger picture.

~~~
Datenstrom
AI self study can certainly get you to the equivalent of a Masters degree, and
much faster for anyone who is motivated, unfortunately I would never recommend
that to anyone.

The problem is that even after years of working in the field you will likely
be underpaid, and it won't be possible to find jobs in the field without a
direct connection. Another problem is that if you want to go for a PhD to
learn beyond that you will need to sit though years and years of useless
classes that you have essentially already taken, just to check some boxes. I
don't think anyone self motivated to learn things will sit though 6 years of
useless classes to check some boxes or at the very least it will be terribly
depressing wasting so much life.

At least that is my experience. The open materials for CS and AI are great
though.

~~~
newguy1234
I believe that within our lifetime we will see a direct replacement of that
traditional model that you are thinking of (only "traditional" universities
offer reputable degrees). New model I see occurring is more focused on
certification based credentials where you have to prove your competency on a
rigorous evaluation by a reputable testing organization. If someone has
obtained specialized knowledge then it should not be an issue if you got it
from online sources or traditional university sources.

