Leveraging AI for engaging educational experiences in public schools and universities

Current educational models, while well-intentioned, are often unable to address the unique potential of each student. Imagine a future where classrooms go beyond uniformity and provide a customized learning experience for everyone. This isn't science fiction, but the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education.

AI promises to disrupt traditional paradigms by developing personalized learning pathways. Imagine intelligent systems that identify individual strengths and weaknesses and dynamically adapt curricula and support structures to optimize learning outcomes. In addition, AI can revolutionize access to resources by automating scholarship matching, ensuring that deserving students are seamlessly matched with financial aid opportunities.

This represents a critical opportunity for public servants. By harnessing the potential of AI, we can usher in a new era of educational equity and efficiency. This article looks at the practical applications of AI in the classroom and explores how it can foster a more inclusive and dynamic learning environment for all students.

Revolutionizing education: The new era of unbound learning with AI

The pandemic acted as a catalyst, catapulting us into a new era of unbound learning. The traditional one-size-fits-all curriculum is no longer enough. Adults are demanding the skills they need to be successful, not outdated knowledge. The surge in online learning platforms and the growing number of adult learners paint a clear picture: education needs to adapt.

The future is personalized, flexible and accessible to all. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the key to unlocking this potential. Imagine intelligent systems that personalize the learning process to each student's individual needs and strengths. Teachers, freed from the burden of rote grading, can guide and inspire, encouraging a love of learning. Students are no longer limited by location and can receive a first-class education anywhere.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the education sector has garnered significant interest from educational institutions and government bodies in the United States. While there are concerns about AI disrupting traditional learning experiences, effective implementation of AI can significantly enhance the quality of education. AI can cater to individual student needs, promote equity, and increase accessibility. By empowering educators and personalizing learning, AI unleashes the limitless potential of every student. Seize this opportunity to create a vibrant learning ecosystem that supports the success of all students through these strategic initiatives.

AI chatbots: Personalized learning support for students and teachers

The conventional education system grapples with challenges such as overcrowded classrooms, limited personalized attention, and diverse learning paces and styles. AI-powered chatbots hold promise as a solution to effectively tackle these issues. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, asserts that generative AI chatbots can teach kids to read in just 18 months, as opposed to years. (1)

These challenges can be mitigated with AI-powered chatbots that provide personalized learning experiences, adapt to individual student needs, and offer continuous support, thus enhancing the overall educational experience.

Nagarro has developed StudyBuddy, a personalized and adaptive chatbot catering to each student's unique learning style and pace. Through its 'Guided Mode,' StudyBuddy offers detailed exploration of subjects, providing step-by-step guidance on complex topics. Moreover, StudyBuddy incorporates content transcription capabilities, enabling students to upload and integrate their own materials, aligning the learning experience with individual interests. Continual engagement is ensured through adaptive content and assessments that evolve alongside students' progress. StudyBuddy maintains focus by implementing guardrails, ensuring educational content remains relevant and on-topic, thereby minimizing distractions. The platform also prioritizes inclusivity, integrating tools like screen readers, video transcripts, and adjustable text sizes to support all students equally.

Designed to replicate human conversation through text, web, or voice interaction, this AI-powered chatbot delivers education on-demand, empowering students to learn at their own pace and unlock their full. AI chatbots provide detailed assignment feedback, explanations, offer additional resources, and step-by-step solutions for homework and complex problems, enhancing the overall learning experience. They empower students with round-the-clock access, expanding their learning beyond traditional classroom hours. This conversational nature of AI-enabled chatbots, which can be adapted in several languages, enhances inclusivity, particularly benefiting students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Not only do these chatbots enhance the learning experience for students, but they also provide invaluable support to teachers and professors in public schools and universities, who often face significant time constraints and limited resources. In many public schools, large class sizes can make it difficult for teachers to provide individualized attention to each student. Similarly, university professors may struggle to keep up with the diverse needs of their students, especially in introductory courses with high enrollment numbers.

Nagarro has built an AI-enabled chatbot Teaching Assistant that can be built on school curriculum-specific course content. The chatbot assistant can tailor course material to each student while adapting to student questions and providing answers accordingly – helping teachers with managing the tutoring in a holistic way. The content filtering capabilities enable content customization, ensuring the delivery of age-appropriate and curriculum-aligned educational materials. Permissions management mechanisms provide granular access control, allowing administrators to tailor access privileges based on grade levels and staff roles.

Additionally, these chatbots aid teachers in streamlining administrative tasks such as scheduling and grading, freeing up more time for teaching. Parents also benefit from real-time updates on their child's academic progress, attendance, and upcoming events, fostering improved communication with schools.

For example in New York City, public schools have introduced Eureka, an AI-powered chatbot capable of independently managing over 30% of calls. This functionality allows users to reset passwords, retrieve information, and check the status of service desk tickets without engaging with a Service Desk agent. Chatbot Eureka enhances operational efficiency by automating routine interactions, enabling educators and administrators to focus on delivering instructional guidance and student support.

Nagarro has built an AI-enabled chatbot with features like barge-in capability, DTMF support, advanced noise cancellation, and multilingual support, it enhances communication across major platforms like Microsoft Teams and SupportHub. This chatbot provides seamless transitions to human agents, mobile access, and an analytics dashboard for continuous service optimization.

Vikas Chandra, Director, Nagarro, who leads the overall project commented on the future scope of the AI chatbot:

As a leader in education technology, I'm thrilled about the transformative impact of AI-powered chatbots. These GenAI bots promise to revolutionize personalized learning by providing round-the-clock support, understanding individual student needs, and delivering tailored educational content and feedback. They also act as invaluable assistants for teachers, handling routine queries and administrative tasks, freeing up time for more impactful teaching and personal interaction. However, as we embrace this innovation, we must prioritize ethical considerations, ensuring the privacy and security of students and educators while continually refining these systems to be more empathetic and effective. The potential of AI chatbots in education is immense, and as technology leaders, we have an exciting responsibility to harness this potential for creating inclusive, responsive, and personalized educational experiences for all.

Chatbots, coupled with comprehensive sentiment analysis, go beyond responding to prompts; they assess responses during calls for more personalized interaction. Quickly assessing emotional tones in help desk interactions helps schools identify urgent issues, enhancing satisfaction for students and parents through prompt resolution.

You can easily deploy such chatbots seamlessly in your organization by  integrating with cloud computing, leveraging NLP, and ML algorithms for effective and natural communication.

Smart Form Fills and Automation: Streamlining Administration for Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness with AI

Running a university or school entails handling paperwork, reviewing extensive documents, and other repetitive tasks. AI can automate these tasks, providing a more efficient experience and significantly improving operational efficiency.

Nagarro’s Form Reviewer simplifies the process of digitizing forms by using advanced OCR technology to accurately extract data from scanned images, and handwritten and typed inputs. It automatically generates clear and actionable rules from complex policy documents using NLP and AI, facilitating smooth policy implementation. With real-time NLP editing, it dynamically refines business rules to adapt to changing operational needs. The platform enhances data analysis by generating detailed summaries at the field level using the GPT 3.5 model, automates document review workflows, and ensures data integrity through external field validation. Detailed dashboard reports offer insights into document processing efficiency while integrating human oversight with Amazon's Textract technology flags data for review if confidence scores fall below specified thresholds.

Nagarro’s Form Generator utilizes AI and GPT-driven technology to seamlessly convert PDFs, images, or written instructions into fully functional forms. It incorporates a conversational interface powered by NLP, allowing users to dictate form specifications easily. It ensures compatibility across platforms by supporting multiple frameworks like HTML, React, or Angular. Smart conversion features streamline input transformation into deployable code, reducing manual coding efforts. The platform offers built-in and customizable field-level validations to ensure form accuracy and personalization. With an intuitive interface, users can preview and customize forms in real-time before deployment. Its low-code/no-code approach eliminates coding complexities, making form deployment accessible to users of all expertise levels.

The Form Generator streamlines the form creation process for school administrators, saving time and reducing the need for technical expertise. By converting documents and instructions into functional forms quickly, it minimizes manual effort. Administrators can easily specify and customize form details, ensuring accuracy and compatibility across platforms. This efficiency allows them to focus on more important educational and administrative tasks, enhancing overall productivity and effectiveness in managing school operations.

Such tools can be designed by leveraging LLMs(GPT models, Gemini, etc.,) reasoning capabilities and document digitization techniques. 

Document summarization

In today's fast-paced academic environment, document summarization is a game-changer, saving time and fostering academic excellence. Burdened with navigating intricate policy documents, administrative staff can greatly benefit from the streamlined insights provided by document summarization. Teachers and professors tasked with creating engaging lesson plans and staying abreast of the latest research are empowered by quick access to condensed knowledge. Likewise, researchers experience a significant boost in efficiency as document summarization accelerates identifying relevant literature and extracting key findings.

Nagarro’s document summarization tool extracts key insights from content to deliver targeted, concise summaries, enabling swift and precise analysis of policy documents. The process begins with simplifying text into clear, straightforward language, coupled with an interactive sidebar navigator highlighting main subheadings for enhanced document access. This ensures content is easy to understand and navigate, preserving informational integrity while facilitating efficient exploration. Additionally, the tool offers persona-based content, providing customized overviews tailored to match the interests and requirements of specific user types. With multilingual support, it caters to diverse linguistic preferences, benefiting businesses operating in international markets. An integrated user assistance chatbot enhances the user experience by providing immediate, conversational support. Furthermore, citation-enabled source document access facilitates direct access to source documents, enabling users to validate information and gain deeper insights. The tool also leverages advanced Natural Language Processing within the chatbot to accurately interpret user inputs and provide responses in a natural, conversational manner, supporting complex, multi-turn dialogues for enhanced interaction.

Course design and planning: Rapid course development customized for evolving needs

Course development, a particularly time-consuming task for teachers and subject matter experts, can benefit from AI integration. While educators would like to have control over course design and would not like to fully automate course development, thought augmenting in systems such as Learning Management System (LMS) can notably expedite the process. AI offers tailored recommendations for teachers, aligning with their unique teaching approaches, and provides support in adapting materials such as quizzes, and assignments to precisely fit their classroom requirements, ensuring a more individualized learning experience.

With AI, it is also possible to create course content faster, tailoring it to the unique learning experience of each student. For example, if a student needs extra help, the system provides targeted support within the course, making tricky concepts easier to grasp. On the flip side, quick learners can try more advanced material. It's like having a learning journey crafted just for you. It tailors educational content through sophisticated algorithms to meet individual needs with multilingual support, providing a personalized and inclusive learning experience. Creating tailored content goes beyond students; envision customized learning programs designed specifically for teachers. These programs are crafted to help educators achieve their goals and captivate and enhance their teaching skills.

AI-enabled analytics can revolutionize education by helping teachers analyze student performance data. This allows them to create personalized content that targets individual learning gaps and develop courses in sync with industry needs, providing students with relevant skills.

AI-enabled enterprise search: Consolidating knowledge repositories for easy access to information

Educational institutions struggle with the challenge of managing numerous documents in their systems, making it difficult to organize and access data efficiently. Enter AI-powered search engines that leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to enhance the understanding of user queries. This leads to more accurate and relevant search results, empowering educators, students, and administrators to swiftly locate any information.

Nagarro’s Enterprise Search Accelerator is a comprehensive and sophisticated information retrieval system designed to streamline information retrieval within large organizational datasets. It employs advanced search algorithms, natural language processing, and machine learning to deliver accurate and relevant results. By leveraging a customized semantic search solution, it enhances efficient search and discovery within the educational institution, spanning academic research, course details, faculty information, and institutional policies.

The Enterprise Search Accelerator utilizes APIs like Cognitive Search and ChatGPT for broad access to web content, ensuring comprehensive search results. A centralized knowledge base consolidates diverse information sources into a single accessible location. An AI guide incorporating LLM enhancements and NLP facilitates conversation-driven interactions and assists users in information discovery. Embedded citations ensure data source verification, enhancing authenticity. The system can integrate with internal document repositories such as SharePoint and deliver domain-specific content tailored to user inquiries. Additionally, features like FAQs and a responsive web app optimize user experience across devices.

AI-powered predictive analytics: Optimizing IT infrastructure and resource management

AI-powered data analytics substantially improves education by furnishing educators and administrators with crucial insights into student performance trends. By analyzing extensive datasets, data analytics facilitates data-driven decision-making, empowering personalized interventions and targeted support to optimize learning outcomes.

AI-driven software optimizes schedules by analyzing various factors, including faculty availability, student preferences, classroom capacities, and equipment requirements. Utilizing historical enrollment data, it efficiently optimizes course demand and faculty workloads to meet student needs.

Predictive IT asset maintenance schedules preventative actions based on performance and usage data, reducing system downtime. Security monitoring and incident response use automated systems to recognize and analyze anomalous patterns, enabling rapid responses to potential security risks and proactively protecting confidential information and IT resources. Leveraging AI, institutions predict infrastructure maintenance needs, minimize disruptions, and maintain peak campus facilities.

Guidelines for implementing AI in education

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense potential to personalize learning experiences. However, implementing AI requires careful consideration. By harnessing the power of AI thoughtfully, we can create a more personalized and equitable learning environment for all.

Human and systemic biases in generative AI algorithms and large language models' (LLMs) data impact the output of AI tools and consequently can perpetuate inequities when these biases are not removed or addressed. It is important for both instructors and students to understand, evaluate, and overall familiarize themselves with generative artificial intelligence tools, whether you decide to incorporate their use into your course or not. Engaging with generative AI tools means using a thoughtful, critical, and ethical lens to determine whether their use will benefit your assignments and assessments, as well as considering how your students may independently be trying to engage with these tools in their learning, either productively or in ways that may challenge their work’s academic integrity.

As an emerging technology, here are a few guidelines on how to approach its implementation.

    Provide timely support and guidance

Ensure prompt assistance and guidance for students, teachers, and staff when implementing AI technology in schools.

    Raise awareness of inherent biases

Educate about the potential biases in AI. Actively train AI on diverse data sets to mitigate such biases. Foster education and awareness on how AI-generated results are produced.

    Protect student privacy

With AI systems capable of collecting and analyzing extensive student data, including sensitive information such as demographics and learning disabilities, it is crucial to educate teachers on data collection, storage, and usage to ensure robust protection of student privacy.

Transformative impact of AI on education is only beginning to unfold. In the coming years, it will be pivotal in revolutionizing learning experiences and offering personalized content tailored to individual needs. Its ability to analyze vast datasets will enable institutions to make data-driven decisions, optimize curriculum design and ensure relevance to evolving workforce demands. Embracing AI isn't merely strategic; it's imperative for maintaining leadership in educational innovation, equipping students and educators for future challenges and navigating the dynamic yet vibrant landscape of Generation AI and the promises of AGI.

Neetesh Vyas, Director, Nagarro

End note

Did you know AI can now analyze student essays, identifying not just grammar errors but also potential misunderstandings of the subject matter? This is just one example of how AI is revolutionizing education.

Imagine an AI system that tailors practice problems to a student's individual needs, offering extra support on challenging concepts. AI can also instantly grade essays, freeing teachers for more personalized feedback, while also analyzing writing patterns to identify areas where students might struggle as a group. There are clear advantages like efficiency, fairness, customized feedback, and improved learning opportunities. However, we must carefully consider the ethical implications of AI.  For instance, AI algorithms trained on biased data could perpetuate stereotypes in their feedback. To ensure fairness, educators need to be involved in selecting and monitoring AI tools. Ultimately, AI is not a replacement for educators but rather a powerful collaborator. With AI handling tedious tasks and providing insightful data, educators can focus on what they do best – inspiring, guiding, and supporting students. This human-AI partnership holds immense potential to create a future where education is personalized, engaging, and empowers all students to thrive in a rapidly changing world.


Citations

(1)    Tom Huddleston Jr.,” Bill Gates says A.I. chatbots will teach kids to read within 18 months: You’ll be ‘stunned by how it helps”, CNBC, Apr 22, 2023.