Cars were forbidden in the town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, until 1918 - some 25 years after the Duryea brothers set up the first car manufacturing company in America. The story goes that, during this time, Clinton Folger, the Island’s postman, towed his “gasoline buggy” to the state highway so that he could then drive to Siasconset on the other side of Nantucket Island to deliver the mail. The picture of the horse-drawn automobile is an apt metaphor for what is happening with artificial intelligence in education today.

Artificial intelligence (AI) learning platforms were launched in the primary and secondary education market a little over a year ago. We’re very much still at the pioneering stage: early adopters are trialling products, suggesting improvements and trying to evaluate their impact on teaching and learning.

It would be wrong to see AI learning platforms simply as the next in a long line of new technologies that have been harnessed to enhance what we are doing in the classroom. AI is so much bigger than that: it will  transform nearly every industry and change society as a whole. It goes without saying that it has the potential to disrupt education. To understand the drivers behind this disruptive potential of AI, we need to consider education from a global perspective.

Edtech is a ripe market

Education is very big business. According to IBIS Capital [Global EdTech Industry Report 2016], education was a $5 trillion (£3.9 trillion) industry globally in 2014 and is growing at $600 billion a year. And yet only 2 per cent of it is digitised - education as an industry is a “late adopter” at best.

And so edtech is increasingly being seen as a ripe market for investors. Three factors make it very attractive: the importance and cost of education to governments and parents, the global teacher shortage and the unsustainability of the present model of one teacher to 20-30 students, and the abundant scope for new markets (there are currently 263 millionm children in the world not in education).

The holy grail of edtech is an effective AI platform that will solve these problems in a scalable and affordable way by providing a personalised learning experience with minimal teacher input. There is scope here to be the “Amazon of education” - it’s no wonder the venture capitalists are turning their attention to edtech.

To date, the AI platforms that have been launched are automating and enhancing aspects of the teaching and learning process. Typically, they conduct a baseline test, they introduce relevant content, which they then test, and, using adaptive algorithms, they provide personalised feedback to the learner, their parents and the teacher. This is helpful but it doesn’t embrace the full transformative power of AI.

In short, we are using AI in education to achieve 20th-century educational outcomes. It is rather like the situation faced by the postman of Nantucket: we have invented the automobile, but we are being forced by the regulators to pull it along with a horse because it doesn’t fit with their outdated view of the world. There is huge latent potential in the way in which AI is being developed that will change radically the educational landscape globally and in the UK.

AI won’t replace teachers

Teacher-pupil contact time is the most precious resource that schools have. This is particularly true of specialist teacher time (e.g., suitably qualified physics teachers), which is already a scarce resource. Looking ahead five to 10 years, AI learning platforms will not replace teachers, but they will change what teachers do, especially in secondary schools as new technologies allow schools to make the most of the limited teacher time available. Looking at things globally, the quality of the education available will be driven by cost and the amount and nature of the human contact time available will determine the price-point.

As Clayton Christensen has argued, disruptive technologies get their foothold in new and emerging markets and then gradually work their way into the mainstream. On this basis, it is possible to predict how AI will transform education. AI learning platforms will have their greatest impact in markets where currently there is no education available.

Budget secondary education will not have face-to-face contact with qualified teachers but will be delivered totally through online courses on learning platforms. This is not a form of schooling that is recognisable to western educationalists, but for many young people around the world this will be better than the present situation of receiving no education at all.

Moving up to mid-range secondary education, this will be delivered through blended learning programmes that combine AI learning platforms, subject specialist teaching via virtual-reality conferencing, and some face-to-face contact with teachers in a bricks-and-mortar environment. The US public school system is in the vanguard of this (for an overview see Keeping Pace with K-12 Digital Learning Reports). However, there’s been little appetite for adopting this model in the UK as was witnessed earlier this year when counsellors rejected the plans to use blended learning at the Ark Pioneer Academy in Barnet.

It will only be in top fee-paying private schools and in the state sector in the wealthiest countries of the world that premium secondary education that will be delivered by specialist teachers in classrooms. Face-to-face teaching in a class of 20-30 will be a luxury (indeed, from a global perspective, it already is). Here AI platforms will enhance and augment the learning process.

Given the level of investment by the private sector into edtech, it is clear that AI in education is here to stay and the days of the horse-drawn automobile are coming to an end. So how best to prepare for the future? Perhaps the most important thing that educationalists can do at this time is inform themselves as to how AI works and to join the debate about what constitutes the ethical use of AI in education before it’s too late.

Mark S Steed is the director JESS, Dubai and has been appointed the principal and CEO of Kellett School, Hong Kong, from September 2019