Four Academicians Outlined the Blueprint Of “Artificial Intelligence and Future Education”
date：2020-08-24 20:17author：小编source：Smart Learning Instituteviews：
At a time when the mission of education intersects with the “artificial intelligent era”, it’s both the responsibility of scientists and educators and a significant question for all human beings to explore how smart technology can contribute to education equity and personal development. On August 20 to August 22, 2020, at the “2020 Global Smart Education Conference” hosted by Beijing Normal University, four academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Zhao Qinping, Wu Hequan, Zhang Jun, and Wang Yaonan, discussed the future of smart education from the aspect of the applications of virtual reality, 5G, intelligent network, and AI in education scenarios.
——Editor’s note
Academician Zhao Qinping:
AI+VR may become the ultimate educational technology
As an important supporting technology for smart education, virtual reality (VR), with computer technology as its core and the combination of other science and technology, is committed to generating a digital environment that resembles the real world in the visual, audio and tactile perceptions. People can use certain devices to interact with the digital environment to produce the experience of being in the real world. VR has 4I characteristics, namely Immersion, Interaction, Imagination and Intelligence.
These characteristics make VR a technology that subverts the existing ones and reshapes our future. Education is a very important application field of virtual reality technology. VR can realize any conceived educational and teaching environment, enabling learners to experience the learning objects and teaching process in an immersive way. The innate connection between VR and AI explains the trend of the integration of the two technologies in their development, which gives impetus to the invention of human-like teaching assistants and the promotion of inquiry-based and self-adjusted learning. The connection further expands the application scenario of smart education and deepens its development. VR + AI may become the ultimate education technology, which will have a profound impact on future education.
At the same time, we must also realize that virtual reality, artificial intelligence and so on are only technologies, which are used as teaching aids. They cannot and should not completely replace teacher’s teaching. The main part of education is about “conveying theories, teaching professional knowledge, and answering the doubts”, and the core content of “critical and innovative thinking” both have to be conducted through the interaction of peoples instead of the interaction between people and machines. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the relevant research on the application of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in education and pay attention to the influence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality environment on the physical and mental effects of students and the influence on society. It is hoped that experts in the fields of education, humanities and social sciences work with people in the scientific and technological sectors to study “AI & VR + Education", jointly promote the development of smart education, and cultivate future-oriented innovative talents.
Academician Wu Hequan:
5G goes to the cloud and integrates wisdom to help education innovation
In the era of smart economy, digital infrastructure is the backbone of new infrastructure, and 5G is the first choice.
5G activates ultra-definition video and the potential of virtual reality technology and becomes a platform for cloud landing. During the pandemic, government-enterprise-school collaboration has successfully implemented a large number of excellent cases of teaching on the cloud. 5G live broadcast can achieve 4K/8K ultra-high-definition, low latency, and the combination of 5G, big data, and artificial intelligence brings highly customized teaching content, which resolves the shortcomings of lack of customization of educational content and systematization of entertainment content. This kind of knowledge points are decomposed, made into sophisticated modules and stored in the cloud. Using 5G to go to the cloud and combined with artificial intelligence technology can form a collaborative experiment platform that supports multiple people to complete an experiment or conduct project-based learning together, and cultivate students’ teamwork spirit. With the increasing popularity and implementation of the concept of lifelong education, 5G will provide better application services for the entire life cycle of education with its significant advantages.
At the same time, we cannot ignore the many challenges faced by 5G+ education. The cost of 5G terminals and AR/VR wearable devices is still high and it is difficult to popularize; there are few courseware that adapt to and reflect the characteristics of 5G; 5G+ education puts forward new requirements for teachers. In addition, it is worth noting that 5G brings a good learning experience, and at the same time, it is necessary to prevent young people from over-indulging in 5G entertainment experience.
Finally, the new era calls for innovation in the talent cultivation model, and higher requirements are placed on the quantity and quality of high-tech talents. The radical changes in the international situation unseen in a century have highlighted that innovative talents have become the focus of competition. At present, our country has upgraded the disciplines of software, integrated circuits, and network security to the first level. There are still many universities that set up colleges of Internet of Things, big data colleges, artificial intelligence colleges, and they have also opened new majors for VR and so on. There efforts reflect our country’s emphasis on the majors which are experiencing a shortage of talents. On the other hand, the over-detailed major setting of information technology is inconducive to offer interdisciplinary trainings and cultivate interdisciplinary talents. As almost all industries have been influenced by the trend of informatization, it’s high time for us to cultivate talents who can integrate the knowledge and skills of informatization and industrialization.
Academician Zhang Jun:
Five-dimensional education promotes the transformation of educational productivity in the new era
The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to build China into a strong internet nation that has a digitalized and smart society, which is a strategic deployment with scientific judgement on the development trend of the information society. The smart society is a forward-looking summary of the development prospects of our country’s information society.
To build a smart society, the development of smart education is indispensable. We need to examine the new contradictions in education from “having education opportunities” to “having good education opportunities”. We need to experience the new teaching environment and new methods reconstructed by intelligent technology and think about future education from the overall perspective and framework of the development of a smart society. From the private schools in the agricultural society to the schools in the industrial society, and now to the large-scale schools in the information society, the evolution of education is characterized by the shortening of space. However, in the era of artificial intelligence, the meaning of education is referring to providing precise education content, self-directed learning and interactive teaching. AI-enabled education has shown a trend of developing from a spatial dimension to an all-round people-oriented development. In the traditional education system, the incoordination between the educational production model with teachers, students, knowledge, and platforms as the elements and the new productive forces has led to the changes in the relations of educational production. The learner is put at the center and surrounded by IT, knowledge, and learning space who reshape the new relation of educational production.
Entering into a smart society where everything can be precepted, connected and intelligent, the ubiquitous education information network, intelligent education infrastructure, inclusive education public services and refined education governance system will be transformed and integrated in five dimensions to reshape the ecology of smart education. The teaching and learning trajectories, paths, companionship, and habits of teachers and students will be caught and calculated; we’ll be able to learn in anytime and life-long from the dimension of time; knowledge will be located in the practice, the industry chain, and the internet.
The integration of five-dimensional education has promoted the transformation of traditional classrooms to smart classrooms to intelligent classrooms. Its core engine is the intelligent networking technology. Through multiple, comprehensive and continuous collaborative perception, multi-scale ultra-bandwidth ubiquitous networks, knowledge-driven intelligent computing, and diverse personalized and accurate intelligent services, five-dimensional education will achieve the realization of the change of the educational production model from an information-to-knowledge one to a knowledge-to-smart one. In the process of this change, schools and teachers are guided to innovate teaching methods suitable for the integration of virtual learning spaces and traditional classroom environments. Through the precipitation and mining of multiple data, support the whole chain calculation of teaching concept evaluation, use new technologies such as artificial intelligence to solve the problem of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude under the class teaching system, support project-oriented teaching, cyberspace teaching, and off-site teaching for students' inquiry ability and problem-solving ability training Synchronous teaching, dual-master teaching mode, flipped classroom, campus online courses, design-based learning, guided mobile inquiry, collaborative knowledge construction, ability-guided learning, etc.
The development of science and technology will promote the reform of the education system. Based on the concepts of intelligence and Internet, and based on the framework of the intelligent networking technology, the relationship between "human-machine-things and the environment" will be reshaped, and space, time and knowledge will be opened up through the construction of "intelligence classrooms". The barriers between them release the vitality of education and realize the valuable growth of students and teachers.
Academician Wang Yaonan:
Smart technology empowers smart livelihood
With the accelerated integration and innovation of artificial intelligence and other technologies, the social form will evolve systematically. The smart society is an advanced social form following the agricultural society, industrial society, and information society. It is an intelligent era where all things can be interconnected, integrated, innovated, collaborated intelligently, and safely controlled. The future robots in the factories will become friendly partners with workers. They can communicate and learn from each other like friends, and jointly promote the integration of humans and machines. The robots of the future society must be able to read the instructions by themselves, automatically equip them according to requirements, and complete tasks. The processing of large parts must be done by multiple robots working together to complete complex parts. Now they are all single-machine operations. Later, they will be completed by intelligent technologies such as cloud computing and Internet edge computing. In the aerospace field, simple assembly will be carried out by robots.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has also put forward new requirements for talent training and provided a new path for educational reform. Artificial intelligence empowers teachers, and it will also change their roles in the teaching mode from knowledge transfer to knowledge construction, and alleviate the problem of teacher shortage and uneven allocation of resources in poverty-stricken areas; artificial intelligence empowers schools to change the form of schooling, improve their service ability, and build learner-centered learning environment; artificial intelligence empowers education governance by changing governance models to promote scientific education decision-making and precise resource allocation that accelerates the formation of a modern education public service system.
We hope that our education field will be aware of changes ahead of time, actively respond to changes, and actively seek changes, through a variety of ways to carry out theoretical innovation and practical exploration, and contribute to the realization of the common interests of all mankind.
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