Hello Readers, welcome back to our blog. Today's post will look at Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Special Education. According to the National Disability Authority (2014), at least 4 percent of school population, to include adult education centres and third level colleges, consists of students with disabilities. Oliver and Reschly (2010) state that special education teachers are not meeting the required needs of students in the special education environment. As a result, students with emotional-behavioural disabilities (EBD), those that are hard of hearing or visually impaired, are prevented from reaching their full potential. Additionally, it has been estimated that 85 percent of college graduates with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are unemployed (Freethink, 2019). Could AI possibly remedy this? The last few decades have proven that Artificial Intelligence and its tools have become an alternative for people with special educational needs (SEN) to access education and improve their quality of life. The educational paths that have never been available for them are now, thanks to AI, unfolding offering the prospect of more independent lives than their predecessors have ever enjoyed (National Disability Authority, 2014). Personalised education uses interactive learning apps and tools such as Duolingo, Gradescope and Thinkster Math (Hunt, 2021). These online tools are designed to track one’s progress and develop skills using machine learning and deep learning so that users can benefit from virtual assistants, intelligent agents (IA) and natural language processing (NLP). While these can make mundane tasks autonomous resulting in more educational, individualised, and collaborative learning (Marr, 2021), AI undoubtedly supports students with dyslexia (Zubir, 2022) and those with autism on their way to becoming more independent and employable (Freethink, 2019). Although automation potential in educational services is as low as 27 percent (Manyika et al., 2017), significant improvements have taken place recently in the way AI supports SEN. In the context of the visually impaired, AI can transform traditional Braille into automated bi-directional translation, to and from a written language and Braille (Yu and Bu, 2021). This includes an improved language model that includes phrase translation, the N-GRAM language model, detection, elimination of invalid homonym words and phrases to be translated into Braille. The AI supported Braille operates on 91.43 percent accuracy when translating a language into Braille and 90.32 percent accuracy when translating Braille into a language. This technology is applicable in educational and other real-world applications. Image Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3481623 (Yu and Bu, 2021) “Language is the driving force of human evolution” (Huang, 2018 in Roach, 2018). Students that are hard of hearing can benefit from an AI-powered cloud service such as the Microsoft Translator app. This translator uses speech recognition to convert spoken language into text. The interpreter connects the app to a headset and the AI custom speech would create a transcription of the text being spoken into the application. The addition of punctuation, removal of disfluencies and up to 60 languages being supported makes this tool an ideal technology for people who are hard of hearing and those who use American Sign Language (ASL). Image Source: https://quotesgram.com/img/quotes-about-teaching-self-reflection/7626620/ (QuotesGram, 2022) These AI innovations of the last decades are a means of addressing the exclusion in the educational system as depicted by Ignacio Estrada in his inspirational quote “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn” (QuotesGram, 2022). Perhaps with AI, the vision of a greater number of young people with SEN becoming employable professionals and working alongside those without deficiencies is closer to becoming a reality. REFERENCES Freethink (2019) Can People with Autism Help Create Next-Generation AI? Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxjF9FAz4Mg [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Hunt, S. (2021) How AI is Being Used in Education. Available at: https://www.datamation.com/artificial-intelligence/how-ai-is-being-used-in-education/#:~:text=Duolingo%20is%20aimed%20at%20a%20broader%20audience%20than,adapts%20and%20evolves%20as%20their%20skill%20levels%20increase [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Manyika, J., Chui, M., Miremadi, M., Bughin, J., George, K., Willmott, P. and Dewhurst, M. (2017) ‘A future that works: AI, Automation, Employment, and Productivity’, Open Access Library Journal, 5(9), Scientific Research. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/Digital%20Disruption/Harnessing%20automation%20for%20a%20future%20that%20works/MGI-A-future-that-works-Executive-summary.ashx [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Marr, B, (2021) How is artificial intelligence (AI) used in education? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW1jg1UiVwo [Accessed 13 March 2022]. National Disability Authority (2014) Education | The National Disability Authority. Available at: https://nda.ie/Disability-overview/Key-Policy-Documents/Report-of-the-Commission-on-the-Status-of-People-with-Disabilities/A-Strategy-for-Equality/A-Strategy-for-Equality-Report-of-the-Commission-on-the-Status-of-People-with-Disabilities/Education/ [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Oliver, R.M. and Reschly, D.J. (2010) ‘Special Education Teacher Preparation in Classroom Organization and Behavior Management’, Handbook of Research on Special Education Teacher Preparation, 35(3), pp. 188-199. QuotesGram (2022) Quotes About Teaching Self Reflection. Available at: https://quotesgram.com/quotes-about-teaching-self-reflection/ [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Roach, J. (2018) ‘AI technology helps students who are deaf learn’, Microsoft: The AI Blog, 5 April. Available at: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/ai-powered-captioning/ [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Yu, C. and Bu, J. (2021) ‘The practice of applying AI to benefit visually impaired people in China’, big trends, 64(11), pp.70-75, Association for Computing Machinery. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3481623 [Accessed 13 March 2022]. Zubir, H. (2022) Final Year Project 1 - Artificial Intelligence in Helping Dyslexia Kids. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiAOoC-ob0M [Accessed 13 March 2022].
0 Comments
|
AuthorMaksym Dresler ArchivesCategories |