Speaking at the annual Educause conference Wednesday, Vocareum’s VP of Learning and Enablement Rochana Golani said educators and IT trainers should focus on encouraging critical-thinking skills and hands-on learning. She said this is especially important for teaching students new skills in emerging technology fields such as cloud computing and data science, as well as ever-changing AI-related careers.
“One of the areas that we are exploring now is this idea of an AI tutor, and that is basically that the teaching assistant is AI. So, the lead instructor is still doing all of the teaching. They are the subject matter expert. But for most commonly answered questions, you're now going to AI instead of a teaching assistant," she said. "And this is still early days. AI makes a lot of mistakes still. But we're getting better every single day in how we're doing that."
As with the development of other technologies in the past, she said, the education and workforce development landscape must find ways to mitigate the potential negatives of AI and maximize its ability to help students learn new skills.
“The more we can prepare students or users in general with the right technology at the right time — that's the critical piece,” she said. “I think we're going to have to think about how we can create an education environment where we remove the negatives and we highlight the positives [of AI-assisted learning] … If we don't teach people critical-thinking skills, reasoning skills and solving their own problems because they can just depend on AI to do that, [that] is a real risk.”
Luckily, according to Vocareum CEO Sanjay Srivastava, universities and companies in ed-tech and workforce development spheres can partner and work together on such challenges, much as they have for upskilling IT professionals in recent years. He said a good example of effective partnership is Vocareum’s recent work with Amazon Web Services to provide Vocareum’s IT workforce training at several universities across the country.
“AWS took [our] labs, put curriculum on top of it and then distributed it to educational institutions, and they just announced [about] four or five weeks ago that they hit a million learners in 6,600 universities, reaching 25,000 to 30,000 teachers,” he said. “What’s pretty exciting [to note] is that these are not learners who maybe started a course and dropped it, but they were actually part of the academic institutions, learning [things like] cloud computing. They were getting college credits, and they were getting ready for professional certification for jobs.”
