Anyone paying attention to technological developments in recent months would have been exposed to ChatGPT and other Large Language Models that have exploded upon the scene. It can now pass various standardised exams better than 90 percent of test-takers and has become a common feature in most schools and universities.
Moreover, they are being considered as a ground-breaking innovation in the education sector by stalwart figures such as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan. However, while such AI models will certainly serve to increase the quality of education on offer, their rise does not portend well for the stability of India’s vast and burgeoning coaching industry.
A Content Revolution
To understand the nature of disruption that AI can cause in the coaching industry, it is first important to understand the main services that these firms provide. The three main services offered by them, which face disruption, are - simplifying and teaching content, conducting various tests and assessments, and providing personalised feedback to students based on test performance. Currently, coaching institutes charge a pretty penny to offer even one of these services.
The first dimension, simplifying content, is one where AI is prodigious. And this gives it immense capability to serve as a personalised teaching assistant. There are AI tools like the YouTubeDigest extension that allows a student to obtain a summary of several hour-long lectures within seconds.
ChatGPT is also competent in summarising any dense article into exam-specific bullet points. Further, based on the given prompts, the above summaries can be curated in infinite ways. For example, you could ask for the gist of a long and dense article to be explained to you like you’re a beginner or 5-year-old, and the output will match your demand.
Moreover, a student could provide multiple inputs, like a book and some newspaper articles for example, to the various extant NLP-based (Natural Language Processing) AI tools, to obtain insights that they want. This would be immensely useful in understanding academic debates for examinations like the civil services examinations. Thus, the venerable position of coaching institutions as your only source of personalised learning is a thing of the past.
Curated Quizzing, Testing
The next important service that coaching firms provide is test creation and its conduction. While institutes could hitherto claim to have a monopoly on creating tests that mimicked the real deal, now, this is no longer the case. Currently, AI tools like ChatGPT already possess the ability to generate limitless amounts of questions mimicking most standardised exams.
Its resemblance to the actual examination is also extremely convincing, given that it has trained on a vast and ever-expanding database of publicly available questions. You can now generate 100 multiple choice questions (MCQs) from the physics textbook by HC Verma, replicating the current IIT exam pattern, curated to your desired style, with ease. Further, it’ll help you reason out the answer, explain it placidly, and clear any doubts.
This curated quizzing and testing, even in its current limited capacity, is very disruptive for the business of many coaching firms. It will also aid in reducing the gulf between small and large coaching firms, as small coaching institutes will now be able to generate tests of a quality, and at a scale, that matches or surpasses many of the big players in this space.
Challenge For Humans, Edtech Firms
Moving beyond the above two areas, we come to the topic of feedback and evaluation. While MCQ based tests are relatively straightforward to evaluate, currently only a few firms like ETS use tools to evaluate subjective answers using computers. However, a revolution in this space is also looming.
Institutes, which manually assess what makes a good answer to a subjective question, based on their interpretations, could soon be outmoded by AI that leverages OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Such tools could parse through the handwritten answers of successful candidates and discern the patterns that distinguish their answers.
This knowhow of what works and what doesn’t will allow anyone with a computer to utilise and benefit from expert-level guidance. Further, as this technology trickles down, or becomes available freely, there won’t be much left to distinguish among institutes.
Of course, the big names in the coaching space have not slept on the above developments. Unacademy has acquired an AI firm called Cohesive AI, and Byjus is developing a tool called BADRI. Similarly, Khan Academy has worked with Open AI to create its AI-based teaching assistant Khanmigo, to work as a general teaching assistant.
Thus, ubiquity of AI in education and coaching in the future is a given. It will be interesting to see how this shakes up the industry. Any changes, or lack thereof, will also help in understanding the importance of the human element in learning. Interesting times lie ahead.
Srimant Mishra is a computer science engineer from VIT university, Vellore, with a deep interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He is currently pursuing a law degree at Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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