Intelligence Unleashed Events

Pearson and the UCL Knowledge Lab recently teamed up to convene the teaching, research, and technology communities for a series of events designed to explore artificial intelligence in the context of education.

Intelligence Unleashed: How Smarter Digital Tools Can Improve Learning

On 22 September 2015 we invited teachers, education experts, education technologists and experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence to our headquarters at 80 Strand for a myth busting session on AI and how it can be used in teaching and learning. The audience heard from Dr Rand Hindi, who led us through the basics of AI, as well as from Prof Rose Luckin of the UCL Knowledge Lab and Prof Benedict du Boulay, president of the International AIED Society.

We recorded the whole thing, so to get a recap of the event you can either watch it on YouTube or read artist Pen Mendonca's beautiful notes.

Intelligence Unleashed: Education and AI in the Lab

On 15th October 2015 the UCL Knowledge Lab hosted a workshop in collaboration with Pearson gathering together teachers, education technologists and experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence to come up with practical ways in which AI could be used to help solve challenges in education.

The challenges had been developed during our first event, and included the following:

How might we use smarter digital tools to...

  1. ...make assessments more beneficial and authentic for teachers and learners?
  2. the capacity to factor in, and adjust for, the impact of student emotions on learning?
  3. ...enliven the arts and humanities with AI?
  4. ...personalise individual learning paths without conflicting with learner development of social relationship and collaborative skills?
  5. ...improve the quality and effectiveness of teachers’ CPD (continuing professional development)?
  6. ...make learning engaging for students who don’t find learning ‘fun’ in standard school contexts?
  7. non-native speaking (EAL) students learn at the same pace their native-speaking peers?

Teams pitched their challenges and proposed solutions to a panel of judges. The winning pitch came from team two, led by Prof Benedict du Boulay. They took up up the question of how we might use smarter digital tools to help alleviate maths anxiety for very young learners. They suggested using AI to create a wearable device (like an education Fitbit) that would alert teachers through a dashboard about how their students are feeling on an ongoing basis, providing for quicker just-in-time support.


Intelligence Unleashed: Will AI make a real difference to learners?

On 22nd February Pearson hosted the culminating event in the Intelligence Unleashed event series in collaboration with the UCL Knowledge Lab. The event was a panel debate featuring experts from education, artificial intelligence, and ed tech.

Introduced by Sir Michael Barber, Chief Education Adviser at Pearson, and featuring, Rod Bristow, head of Core Markets at Pearson, Tom Bennett, Mark McCourt, and Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, our provocative prompt for the evening was:

“Artificial Intelligence in Education is just the latest in a line of fads in education technology, and it won’t make any difference to learning.”