Varsities join hands to develop online courses
ISLAMABAD: The Higher Education Commission (HEC)’s higher education development in Pakistan (HEDP) project hosted the second meeting of a consortium of 11 universities at the National University of Sciences and Technology (Nust) to develop asynchronous online courses as a part of the new undergraduate core curriculum nationwide.
The consortium is formulated based on the expertise of these universities in developing and delivering quality online learning platforms.
It includes Allama Iqbal Open University, Aga Khan University, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, Comsats University, Habib University, Hazara University, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore College for Women University, National University of Sciences and Technology, University of Baltistan and Virtual University of Pakistan.
According to a statement, vice chancellors and senior officials of all these universities attended the meeting. The new curriculum adds 11 core courses drawn from five broad categories of HEC undergraduate policy courses.
These universities will contribute courses on PakistanEdX by offering multilingual options in five categories of arts and humanities, social sciences, quantitative skills, natural sciences and expository writing.
PakistanEdX is a key activity launched under the umbrella of the HEDP project supported by the World Bank. It aims to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) in line with well-known international platforms - Coursera, EdX - with the vision to expand the horizon of quality education at the national level, especially targeting the far-flung and underprivilege areas.
PakistanEdX will provide subsidised courses to the underprivileged youth.
The platform is developed by the same organisation which has been a major developer for several international learning platforms like MIT/Harvard’s edX, University of California San Diego, edX and Wikimedia. The technology built by this firm has already served over 55 million students worldwide.
Nust Rector retired Lt Gen Javed Mahmood Bukhari said: “We at Nust offer our full support for this visionary initiative. It’s right time to take advantage of this opportunity and enable our future generations with right blend of new learning. I appreciate entire HEC/HEDP team for this remarkable endeavour.”
Maryam Riaz, project coordinator HEDP, explained how important it was to take feedback of universities in making any policy around higher education.
The representatives of participating universities deliberated on what each university can offer and when each course will be available for the platform. The discussion focused on how these courses can be credited and what were the parameters for three credit hour course by HEC.
The sustainability and financial models were discussed with the aim to ensure high quality and accessibility aspects.
The meeting agreed to develop collaborative models among universities for the development of high-quality MOOCs with the involvement of experienced and specialised faculty from different universities. All universities agreed to task technical members for various subcommittees for PakistanEdX execution that can work on focused aspects.
Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1681985/varsi ... ne-courses
ONLINE EDUCATION
Will Chatbots Teach Your Children?
New A.I. tools could enable a Silicon Valley dream: bots that customize learning for pupils. Prior attempts have not lived up to the hype.
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, predicted last year that A.I. tutoring bots would soon revolutionize education. Big Tech executives have similar visions.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education.
“We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for millions of students, declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
Videos of Mr. Khan’s tutoring bot talk amassed millions of views. Soon, prominent tech executives, including Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, began issuing similar education predictions.
“I think over time we can give every child in the world and every person in the world — regardless of where they are and where they come from — access to the most powerful A.I. tutor,” Mr. Pichai said on a Harvard Business Review podcast a few weeks after Mr. Khan’s talk. (Google introduced an A.I. chatbot called Bard last year. It has also donated more than $10 million to Khan Academy.)
Image
Students with backpacks sit at communal desks working on laptops.
Students at Khan Lab School, a nonprofit independent school in Mountain View, Calif., can use a new A.I. tutoring bot developed by Khan Academy, a separate nonprofit group. Both nonprofits were founded by Sal Khan.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Mr. Khan’s vision of tutoring bots tapped into a decades-old Silicon Valley dream: automated teaching platforms that instantly customize lessons for each student. Proponents argue that developing such systems would help close achievement gaps in schools by delivering relevant, individualized instruction to children faster and more efficiently than human teachers ever could.
In pursuit of such ideals, tech companies and philanthropists over the years have urged schools to purchase a laptop for each child, championed video tutorial platforms and financed learning apps that customize students’ lessons. Some online math and literacy interventions have reported positive effects. But many education technology efforts have not proved to significantly close academic achievement gaps or improve student results like high school graduation rates.
Now the spread of generative A.I. tools like ChatGPT, which can give answers to biology questions and manufacture human-sounding book reports, is renewing enthusiasm for automated instruction — even as critics warn that there is not yet evidence to support the notion that tutoring bots will transform education for the better.
Online learning platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo have introduced A.I. chatbot tutors based on GPT-4. That is a large language model, developed by OpenAI, which is trained on huge databases of texts and can generate answers in response to user prompts.
And some tech executives envision that, over time, bot teachers will be able to respond to and inspire individual students just like beloved human teachers.
“Imagine if you could give that kind of teacher to every student 24/7 whenever they want for free,” Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, said last summer on an episode of the “Possible” podcast. (The podcast is co-hosted by Reid Hoffman, an early investor in OpenAI.) “It’s still a little bit science fiction,” Mr. Brockman added, “but it’s much less science fiction than it used to be.”
Image
Greg Brockman, seated in a red chair, is wearing a long-sleeve blue knit shirt and white pants.
Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, suggested that A.I. tutors might one day be able to get to know and inspire students as human teachers can do.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The White House seems sold. In a recent executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden directed the government to “shape A.I.’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying A.I.-enabled educational tools, such as personalized tutoring in schools,” according to a White House fact sheet.
Even so, some education researchers say schools should be wary of the hype around A.I.-assisted instruction.
For one thing, they point out, A.I. chatbots liberally make stuff up and could feed students false information. Making the A.I. tools a mainstay of education could elevate unreliable sources as classroom authorities. Critics also say A.I. systems can be biased and are often opaque, preventing teachers and students from understanding exactly how chatbots devise their answers.
In fact, generative A.I. tools may turn out to have harmful or “degenerative” effects on student learning, said Ben Williamson, a chancellor’s fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh.
“There’s a rush to proclaim the authority and the usefulness of these kinds of chatbot interfaces and the underlying language models that power them,” Dr. Williamson said. “But the evidence that A.I. chatbots can deliver those effects does not yet exist.”
Another concern: The hype over unproven A.I. chatbot tutors could detract from more traditional, human-centered interventions — like universal access to preschool — that have proved to increase student graduation rates and college attendance.
There are also issues of privacy and intellectual property. Many large language models are trained on vast databases of texts that have been scraped from the internet, without compensating creators. That could be a problem for unionized teachers concerned about fair labor compensation. (The New York Times recently sued OpenAI and Microsoft over this issue.)
There are also concerns that some A.I. companies may use the materials that educators input, or the comments that students make, for their own business purposes, such as improving their chatbots.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has more than 1.7 million members, said her union was working with Congress on regulation to help ensure that A.I. tools were fair and safe.
“Educators use education technology every day, and they want more say over how the tech is deployed in classrooms,” Ms. Weingarten said. “The goal here is to promote the potential of A.I. and guard against the serious risks.”
This is hardly the first time that education reformers have championed automated teaching tools. In the 1960s, proponents predicted that mechanical and electronic devices called “teaching machines” — which were programmed to ask students questions on topics like spelling or math — would revolutionize education.
Image
A portion of the front page of The New York Times on July 9, 1964, featuring a photo of a child sitting on a chair with her hands on the keyboard of a teaching machine that looks like a big typewriter.
An article in The New York Times in 1964 described a new electronic teaching machine intended to help students with reading. The device asked children to type certain letters or words on a keyboard.Credit...The New York Times
Popular Mechanics captured the zeitgeist in an article in October 1961 headlined: “Will Robots Teach Your Children?” It described “a rash of experimental machine teaching” sweeping schools across the United States in which students worked independently, inputting answers into the devices at their own pace.
The article also warned that the newfangled machines raised some “profound” questions for educators and children. Would the teacher, the article asked, become “simply a glorified babysitter”? And: “What does machine teaching do to critical thinking on the part of the students?”
Cumbersome and didactic, the teaching machines turned out to be a short-term classroom sensation, both overhyped and over-feared. The rollout of new A.I. teaching bots has followed a similar narrative of potential education transformation and harm.
Image
Four photos are arranged in a square on a newspaper page under a headline that says, “The Growing Variety of Teaching Machines.”
Text with these photos in 1962 described teaching machines as a “mushrooming field.” Among the examples: classroom devices that used tape recorders for language training. Credit...The New York Times
Unlike the old 20th-century teaching machines, however, A.I. chatbots seem improvisational. They generate instant responses to individual students in conversational language. That means they can be fun, compelling and engaging.
Some enthusiasts envision A.I. tutoring bots becoming study buddies that students could quietly consult without embarrassment. If schools broadly adopted such tools, they could deeply alter how children learn.
That has inspired some former Big Tech executives to move into education. Jerome Pesenti, a former vice president of A.I. at Meta, recently founded a tutoring service called Sizzle A.I. The app’s A.I. chatbot uses a multiple-choice format to help students solve math and science questions.
And Jared Grusd, a former chief strategy officer at social media company Snap, co-founded a writing start-up called Ethiqly. The app’s A.I. chatbot can help students organize and structure essays as well as give them feedback on their writing.
Mr. Khan is one of the most visible proponents of tutoring bots. Khan Academy introduced an A.I. chatbot named Khanmigo last year specifically for school use. It is designed to help students think through problems in math and other subjects — not do their schoolwork for them.
Image
A person is typing on a laptop keyboard. On the screen are math questions.
Students at Khan Lab School were among the first to try Khanmigo, a new A.I. tutoring bot that can help students work through math problems and other subjects.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
The system also stores conversations that students have with Khanmigo so that teachers may review them. And the site clearly warns users: “Khanmigo makes mistakes sometimes.” Schools in Indiana, New Jersey and other states are now pilot-testing the chatbot tutor.
Mr. Khan’s vision for tutoring bots can be traced back in part to popular science fiction books like “The Diamond Age,” a cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. In that novel, an imaginary tablet-like device is able to teach a young orphan exactly what she needs to know at exactly the right moment — in part because it can instantly analyze her voice, facial expression and surroundings.
Mr. Khan predicted that within five years or so, tutoring bots like Khanmigo would be able to do something similar, with privacy and safety guardrails in place.
“The A.I. is just going to be able to look at the student’s facial expression and say: ‘Hey, I think you’re a little distracted right now. Let’s get focused on this,’” Mr. Khan said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/tech ... ogin-email
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, predicted last year that A.I. tutoring bots would soon revolutionize education. Big Tech executives have similar visions.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education.
“We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for millions of students, declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
Videos of Mr. Khan’s tutoring bot talk amassed millions of views. Soon, prominent tech executives, including Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, began issuing similar education predictions.
“I think over time we can give every child in the world and every person in the world — regardless of where they are and where they come from — access to the most powerful A.I. tutor,” Mr. Pichai said on a Harvard Business Review podcast a few weeks after Mr. Khan’s talk. (Google introduced an A.I. chatbot called Bard last year. It has also donated more than $10 million to Khan Academy.)
Image
Students with backpacks sit at communal desks working on laptops.
Students at Khan Lab School, a nonprofit independent school in Mountain View, Calif., can use a new A.I. tutoring bot developed by Khan Academy, a separate nonprofit group. Both nonprofits were founded by Sal Khan.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Mr. Khan’s vision of tutoring bots tapped into a decades-old Silicon Valley dream: automated teaching platforms that instantly customize lessons for each student. Proponents argue that developing such systems would help close achievement gaps in schools by delivering relevant, individualized instruction to children faster and more efficiently than human teachers ever could.
In pursuit of such ideals, tech companies and philanthropists over the years have urged schools to purchase a laptop for each child, championed video tutorial platforms and financed learning apps that customize students’ lessons. Some online math and literacy interventions have reported positive effects. But many education technology efforts have not proved to significantly close academic achievement gaps or improve student results like high school graduation rates.
Now the spread of generative A.I. tools like ChatGPT, which can give answers to biology questions and manufacture human-sounding book reports, is renewing enthusiasm for automated instruction — even as critics warn that there is not yet evidence to support the notion that tutoring bots will transform education for the better.
Online learning platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo have introduced A.I. chatbot tutors based on GPT-4. That is a large language model, developed by OpenAI, which is trained on huge databases of texts and can generate answers in response to user prompts.
And some tech executives envision that, over time, bot teachers will be able to respond to and inspire individual students just like beloved human teachers.
“Imagine if you could give that kind of teacher to every student 24/7 whenever they want for free,” Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, said last summer on an episode of the “Possible” podcast. (The podcast is co-hosted by Reid Hoffman, an early investor in OpenAI.) “It’s still a little bit science fiction,” Mr. Brockman added, “but it’s much less science fiction than it used to be.”
Image
Greg Brockman, seated in a red chair, is wearing a long-sleeve blue knit shirt and white pants.
Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, suggested that A.I. tutors might one day be able to get to know and inspire students as human teachers can do.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The White House seems sold. In a recent executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden directed the government to “shape A.I.’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying A.I.-enabled educational tools, such as personalized tutoring in schools,” according to a White House fact sheet.
Even so, some education researchers say schools should be wary of the hype around A.I.-assisted instruction.
For one thing, they point out, A.I. chatbots liberally make stuff up and could feed students false information. Making the A.I. tools a mainstay of education could elevate unreliable sources as classroom authorities. Critics also say A.I. systems can be biased and are often opaque, preventing teachers and students from understanding exactly how chatbots devise their answers.
In fact, generative A.I. tools may turn out to have harmful or “degenerative” effects on student learning, said Ben Williamson, a chancellor’s fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh.
“There’s a rush to proclaim the authority and the usefulness of these kinds of chatbot interfaces and the underlying language models that power them,” Dr. Williamson said. “But the evidence that A.I. chatbots can deliver those effects does not yet exist.”
Another concern: The hype over unproven A.I. chatbot tutors could detract from more traditional, human-centered interventions — like universal access to preschool — that have proved to increase student graduation rates and college attendance.
There are also issues of privacy and intellectual property. Many large language models are trained on vast databases of texts that have been scraped from the internet, without compensating creators. That could be a problem for unionized teachers concerned about fair labor compensation. (The New York Times recently sued OpenAI and Microsoft over this issue.)
There are also concerns that some A.I. companies may use the materials that educators input, or the comments that students make, for their own business purposes, such as improving their chatbots.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has more than 1.7 million members, said her union was working with Congress on regulation to help ensure that A.I. tools were fair and safe.
“Educators use education technology every day, and they want more say over how the tech is deployed in classrooms,” Ms. Weingarten said. “The goal here is to promote the potential of A.I. and guard against the serious risks.”
This is hardly the first time that education reformers have championed automated teaching tools. In the 1960s, proponents predicted that mechanical and electronic devices called “teaching machines” — which were programmed to ask students questions on topics like spelling or math — would revolutionize education.
Image
A portion of the front page of The New York Times on July 9, 1964, featuring a photo of a child sitting on a chair with her hands on the keyboard of a teaching machine that looks like a big typewriter.
An article in The New York Times in 1964 described a new electronic teaching machine intended to help students with reading. The device asked children to type certain letters or words on a keyboard.Credit...The New York Times
Popular Mechanics captured the zeitgeist in an article in October 1961 headlined: “Will Robots Teach Your Children?” It described “a rash of experimental machine teaching” sweeping schools across the United States in which students worked independently, inputting answers into the devices at their own pace.
The article also warned that the newfangled machines raised some “profound” questions for educators and children. Would the teacher, the article asked, become “simply a glorified babysitter”? And: “What does machine teaching do to critical thinking on the part of the students?”
Cumbersome and didactic, the teaching machines turned out to be a short-term classroom sensation, both overhyped and over-feared. The rollout of new A.I. teaching bots has followed a similar narrative of potential education transformation and harm.
Image
Four photos are arranged in a square on a newspaper page under a headline that says, “The Growing Variety of Teaching Machines.”
Text with these photos in 1962 described teaching machines as a “mushrooming field.” Among the examples: classroom devices that used tape recorders for language training. Credit...The New York Times
Unlike the old 20th-century teaching machines, however, A.I. chatbots seem improvisational. They generate instant responses to individual students in conversational language. That means they can be fun, compelling and engaging.
Some enthusiasts envision A.I. tutoring bots becoming study buddies that students could quietly consult without embarrassment. If schools broadly adopted such tools, they could deeply alter how children learn.
That has inspired some former Big Tech executives to move into education. Jerome Pesenti, a former vice president of A.I. at Meta, recently founded a tutoring service called Sizzle A.I. The app’s A.I. chatbot uses a multiple-choice format to help students solve math and science questions.
And Jared Grusd, a former chief strategy officer at social media company Snap, co-founded a writing start-up called Ethiqly. The app’s A.I. chatbot can help students organize and structure essays as well as give them feedback on their writing.
Mr. Khan is one of the most visible proponents of tutoring bots. Khan Academy introduced an A.I. chatbot named Khanmigo last year specifically for school use. It is designed to help students think through problems in math and other subjects — not do their schoolwork for them.
Image
A person is typing on a laptop keyboard. On the screen are math questions.
Students at Khan Lab School were among the first to try Khanmigo, a new A.I. tutoring bot that can help students work through math problems and other subjects.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
The system also stores conversations that students have with Khanmigo so that teachers may review them. And the site clearly warns users: “Khanmigo makes mistakes sometimes.” Schools in Indiana, New Jersey and other states are now pilot-testing the chatbot tutor.
Mr. Khan’s vision for tutoring bots can be traced back in part to popular science fiction books like “The Diamond Age,” a cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. In that novel, an imaginary tablet-like device is able to teach a young orphan exactly what she needs to know at exactly the right moment — in part because it can instantly analyze her voice, facial expression and surroundings.
Mr. Khan predicted that within five years or so, tutoring bots like Khanmigo would be able to do something similar, with privacy and safety guardrails in place.
“The A.I. is just going to be able to look at the student’s facial expression and say: ‘Hey, I think you’re a little distracted right now. Let’s get focused on this,’” Mr. Khan said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/tech ... ogin-email