Humankind has always been fascinated with the idea of getting things done quickly. Since ancient times, inventors have used their intellectual brilliance to address contemporary problems and make life easier for people. In the field of education, the invention of paper, for example, encouraged the dissemination of information across different sections of society. Similarly, exceptional persons continued contributing to the development of the education system in one way or another. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in the limelight, especially in Higher Education.

In the beginning, the role of AI was very limited in education. People continued to prefer conventional classroom methodology and resorted to technologically stimulated methods only infrequently. Things began changing with the advent of the Internet and its commercialization in the later 90s. But, the main push came in 2020 when the devastating pandemic, under which we are still reeling, put a halt on conventional means of education. Higher Education has now become driven by AI and its many tools.

Today, we will find out what AI has done to Higher Education.

1. Adaptive Learning Platforms
   Many of you must have worked on platforms that assess your performance based on scores in various assignments. They study your answers, common mistakes, and time is taken among many other things. Based on their analyses, they tailor all the future assignments. To give you a simpler example, I use a language App that has a review segment. You answer the various questions, and every time you answer wrongly the said question gets popped up in different interactive ways until you get it right a certain number of times. This is AI mapping your performance and tailoring your assessment. Many universities have already begun implementing platforms like these for their students and generating good results.

2. Smart Classrooms
   After having been forced into our homes and made to learn from behind a digital screen, we have started looking for ways to keep our interests intact. Virtual learning can be boring, I admit; it can become less interactive, less responsive, and more stagnant. So, AI is being used to contain these ill effects and has been introduced in the forms of smart classrooms. Platforms such as MS Teams and Google Classroom have many features to boost the quality of education such as whiteboard, detection of whether the student is there or not, automatic tabulation, and placement of all the participants in a shared background, etc.

3. Virtual teaching Assistants
   Teachers are generally overburdened, and at times, they end up doing work beyond their regular academic duties. Certain tasks can be replaced by AI—and thankfully, they are being replaced as we speak. Many universities now operate chatbots or virtual teaching assistants. A basic example can be found on the official website of the universities where a bot would drop a text to you for assistance. These bots have been data-fed to answer certain queries, and only beyond that, human intervention will be invited. You may also be able to see these assistants being employed in classroom teaching as well.

4. Encouraging Quality Research
   Academia has become increasingly strict with respect to the quality of research. By the incorporation of advanced algorithms, anti-plagiarism software has become a powerful tool in the world of research. A number of improved software have come up with time such as Turnitin and have expanded the coverage and increased the quality of detection. Their databases are considerably huge, algorithms detect excessive paraphrasing and identify patterns, and they cover many kinds of works, from blogs to thesis. Universities across the globe have subscribed to such software.

5. Enhanced collaboration and accessibility
   Admittedly, in the absence of digital literacy, much of these enhancements will be limited to a more resourceful population. However, work is underway to achieve significant digital literacy in due course of time. Meanwhile, AI is being effectively incorporated to enhance collaboration between teachers and AI. How? Let me illustrate: you must have often heard about the feature of real-time subtitles. Often, during video conferencing through advanced software such as MS Teams, you can read real-time subtitles as the instructor speaks. This is the work of AI. This feature has helped many with linguistic limitations–and this is one of the many examples.

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