Pan Hui has already been replaced by artificial intelligence — and he did the replacing himself. In 2023, one of his students mentioned that they were a little bored seeing the same professor every lesson and might enjoy being taught by some different faces. This gave Hui an idea: why not use generative AI and an avatar to teach the students instead.
“I wanted to see whether the students would accept avatar teachers in the classroom and how they respond to this technology,” he says.
Like many researchers and educators, Hui, a computer scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) in China, views AI as a tool with potentially transformative power in education. So, over ten weeks in early 2024, postgraduate students were taught a course by various digital avatars. They could ask questions of the avatar and an underlying large language model (LLM) provided real-time responses, syncing facial animations to the answers. Hui and colleagues collected data on the students’ experience via surveys and interviews. Members of his class reported that certain human-like avatars, such as one that looked like Albert Einstein, felt more trustworthy than cartoonish avatars1.
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Hui’s experiment provides clues to the approach that an ‘AI-first’ higher-education provider might take in the classroom. AI has already had a seismic impact on higher education as existing universities race to integrate a suite of tools and LLMs into administration, curriculum design, teaching and assessment — and at the same time grapple with students’ use of LLMs. The struggles faced by universities so far, both ethical and pedagogical, arise from the rapid deployment of AI tools into higher-education systems that were not equipped to handle them.
But what if new universities were built with AI as a core tool? From admissions that can be handled by AI agents directing prospective students towards particular courses, to personalized tutoring and lesson plans based on individual learning needs and progress, there is an opportunity to completely rethink how a university works as an educational institution.
Such ‘AI-first’ universities might find it easier to integrate technology, because they would include AI systems as the foundation of everything they do, suggests Helen Crompton, executive director of the Research Institute for Digital Innovation in Learning at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
For some higher-education observers, however, there is both opportunity and concern. Anthony Kaziboni, a sociologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, says he is worried that if the companies behind AI systems are too involved in reshaping education, it would cause problems because their motivations “are not rooted in pedagogy, but profit”.
Computer scientist Pan Hui presents an AI teacher to his class at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) in China.Credit: Yawei Zhao
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