Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Last week the new UK government announced a new project that they say will enhance AI’s ability to assist teachers in marking work and planning lessons.

The press release says:

Teaching standards, guidelines and lesson plans will form a new optimised content store which will train generative AI to make it more reliable for teachers in England

new project will bring teachers and tech companies together to develop and use trustworthy AI tools that can help mark homework and save teachers time

comes as new research shows parents want teachers to use AI to reduce out of hours work and boost time spent teaching children

The government is investing £4 million in the project to pool government documents including curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools so they generate accurate, high-quality content, like tailored, creative lesson plans and workbooks, that can be reliably used in schools. 

The content store, they say, is targeted at technology companies specialising in education to build tools which will help teachers mark work, create teaching materials for use in the classroom and assist with routine school admin. 

There is not unanimous support for the announcement. UK teachers have been protesting about high workloads over a prolonged period of time, with substantial numbers leaving the profession. And amongst the flood of AI releases targeted at education, tools like teachermatic to support teachers have been relatively successful in the UK. But concerns include giving more funding and ultimately power to teh tech industry as well as providing them with student data, even if anonymized. Another question is whether the development of AI based on a national curriculum (and it is important to remember that Wales and Scotland have separate and different curricula) may lead towards an overly centralised curriculum, with AI providing less diverse learning materials.

 

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