How will AI impact teachers?

Leave a reply

Super-charger

ChatGPT has recently triggered tremendous excitement about AI and its potential impact on education. Much interest has focused on the learner experience, including the ability to personalise learning. There have of course also been concerns around cheating and plagiarism.

However, AI also has the potential to super-charge teachers.

According to McKinsey, 20-40% of current teacher time comprises tasks that could be automated. They estimate that teachers could re-direct approximately 13 hours per week towards activities that raise student outcomes and increase teacher satisfaction.  The tasks of preparing lessons, administration, evaluation and feedback are flagged as high potential for AI.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

These results echo those of Sanoma’s Learning Impact Survey, in which teachers indicate a desire to go digital in those areas which were most labour intensive, flagging essentially the same areas.  This suggests both that the opportunity is in these tasks and that the profession is looking for solutions.

present_vs_ideal

Teaching profession under pressure

The teacher is arguably the most positive intervention in education.  However the teaching profession faces significant challenges.  UNESCO estimates an additional 69m teachers need to enter the profession by 2030 to fulfil global demand.  In some parts of the world, teacher turnover is high, for example in parts of the USA annual teacher turnover exceeds 15%.  In the UK more than 80% of teachers are considering leaving the profession due to dis-satisfaction.

Higher impact & happier teachers needed!

Furthermore, on average teachers spend only half of their time actually teaching.  This represents not only lost productivity from the core task but is also demotivating for many teachers whose passion is to teach rather than the ancillary tasks around it.  Enabling teacher workflow could therefore not only increase productivity but also make the profession more attractive.

SVGZ-AI-boon-Ex1.svgz

$400bn impact & opportunity

The opportunity to solve this productivity gap is huge.  Measured in terms of financials, assuming global spending on education to be some $6trn, of which 45% is on K-12 education,  and of which 75% is spent on staff salaries, this implies a global spend on teaching/staff salaries of some $2trn per year.  A 20-40% uplift in productivity through AI could arguably be worth some $400-800bn per year in terms of paid and unpaid output!  Which is not to say that this is a saving governments could make or a revenue that education companies could earn, because a significant slice of that value should rightfully return to teachers through higher salaries and quality of life, and another part would rightfully get re-directed to teacher-student interaction to increase outcomes and professional satisfaction.

20%

Help the teacher to focus on teaching!

It’s my belief that the teacher will continue to be the killer app in education, and that the biggest opportunity to make not only a positive impact on learning and teaching in K-12 but also to build a successful business, is to enable the workflow of the teacher.  Probably by combining it with the other side of the same coin: the learn-flow (learning experience) of the student.  

Looking forward >>

It will be exciting to see how we deploy AI in the coming years for a positive impact on learning. Looking forward >>.

Attention edtech champions! 

Leave a reply

EdTechX Awards 2022

EdTechX is currently running the 10th edition of the All Stars Awards. They’re a fantastic opportunity to see who’s shaping the future of edtech, with previous winners including the heroes at Kahoot!, Kognity, Busuu, OpenClassrooms and FutureLearn.

Learning, Earning and Yearning

They say there are three ingredients to the good life, learning, earning and yearning, which seems to have inspired the three categories this year:

  • Startup, for ventures with annual revenues of less than €5M, who have demonstrated stellar innovation and growth over the last year Apply here >>
  • Scale-Up for ventures with annual revenues over €5M who have delivered outstanding revenue growth momentum over the last 3 years Apply here >>
  • ESG & Impact for companies who can demonstrate positive ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policies and impact strategies. Apply here >>

Summit Up

EdTechX is accepting applications right now – don’t miss the deadline of 30th April.  

Winners and finalists will be announced at the EdTechX Awards Ceremony during the EdTechX Summit on 23 June in London.

Looking forward >>

I’ve joined all of the EdtechX meetings to date and they’re a great place to network with the movers and shakers in the industry.  It’s also a perfect opportunity to visit London again 😊.

A Life on Our Planet

Leave a reply

Since Life on Earth was first broadcasted, I’ve loved David Attenborough’s work – a fascinating and beautifully produced narrative of natural history. No doubt Attenborough in part also inspired me to study the life sciences.

I enjoyed his latest book too: A Life on Our Planet.  He puts forward his witness statement and a vision for the future: how to rewild the world. It’s a compelling account of the impact of humans on our planet and what we need to do to create a sustainable future.

Biodiversity?

As a biologist I was shocked to learn this:

  • There are currently about 9,000,000 different species inhabiting our planet, one of which is of course Homo sapiens.
  • Today our farmland covers 5 billion hectares: more than half of the habitable land on the planet.
  • Nearly 80% of that land, 4 billion hectares, equivalent to the whole of North and South America is used for meat and dairy production.
  • Beef represents only 2% of the calories we consume but we dedicate 60% of our farmland to raising it!
  • Our population continues to grow and is forecasted to peak at between 9-11 billion people, up from almost 8 billion today. 
  • As we get richer, we continue to eat more meat.  The average meat consumption in the USA today is 120kg per person annually.  In Europe it’s 60-80kg. In Kenya, 16kg and in India it’s 4kg (with cultural factors encouraging vegetarianism there too).

Wise human?

Billions of additional people eating more meat each year is unlikely to be a sustainable path towards a biodiverse future.

Are we eating the right things in the right proportions?

Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’.  What would a wise human do in this situation?

Paper – where efficacy meets equity

Leave a reply

I was excited to read about this $270M Series D round for Canadian-based ubiquitous tutoring solution Paper – where efficacy meets equity.

A thousand blossoms blooming

Bloom’s seminal work on the 2 Sigma Problem, carried out in the early 1980’s is a classic must-read for edtech ventures today. The outcomes of the research are startling, showing that an average student under tutoring performs about two standard deviations above the average performance of a conventional class. 

Or put another way, an average student following a tutoring program outperforms 98% of students in a conventional classroom!

Since then, the private tutoring market has grown significantly, although new regulations in China last year driven by concerns around equity and student well-being did have a significant negative impact on that market. 

Efficacy AND equity

The good thing about the private tutoring market is its efficacy – it raises learner outcomes.  The disadvantage however is that the rich tend to benefit disproportionately, because they can afford it. The resulting inequity can’t be a good design principle for the provision of education.

Since Bloom, the search has been on to provide solutions that yield similar efficacy at scale.  Paper is potentially such a solution.  For a fixed price, Paper sells licenses to schools and districts to make its online tutoring support available to every student, around the clock, with no cap on usage. Students can connect with a trained tutor for homework help, writing feedback and study support across all K-12 subject areas. Teachers at schools can access these sessions, see which students need support, and adjust their instruction accordingly.

I’m enthusiastic about this approach because it enables both efficacy and equity in education. The risk of inequity isn’t completed removed of course because richer schools might be more likely to adopt the solution than poorer.  Yet with most K-12 education systems funded publicly, that risk could be mitigated by policy. A second risk could be increased competition between schools and tutoring companies for teachers.  Yet the deployment of university students and new/re-entrants into the profession could also work to increase the overall talent pool of teachers available.

Looking forward >>

I’m very interested to see how Paper will grow in the coming years and believe there could be international potential for this type of solution.

BETTer Future

Leave a reply

I’ll be visiting London and BETT at the end of March (probably 22nd -24th).  As for so many of us this will be my first trade fair since the pandemic and I’m really looking forward to joining in real life again (never expected to be this enthusiastic about a trade fair, not even BETT 😊). It does feel like we are now emerging from the restrictions of the last couple of years and I’m excited to get out there again.

I’m especially interested to meet people from companies with strong market positions, from scale-ups and from investors in the education, edtech, science and healthtech spaces during my trip to London.

As of March I have some availability for advisory and interim work and have extensive skills and experience in leadership/leading change, digital/transformation and commercial/strategy work.  I have deep knowledge and networks across the European education sector.

I’m also open to become a Non-Executive Director of such an organisation, as long as this doesn’t conflict with existing work. Very flexible in terms of location.

Feel free to send me a message at johnmartin@contentconnected.com or DM me on social media if you would like to meet up in London!

Looking forward >>

#OpenForWork #Leadership #Education #Edtech #Science #Digital #Transformation