The head of Dubai’s education board, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), has said that artificial intelligence-powered teachers will be in the emirate’s classrooms within a decade, Gulf News has reported.
KHDA director-general Dr Abdullah Al Karam discussed the rise of AI in his keynote address to the organisation’s What Works conference at Emirates Aviation University.
The KHDA event served as a platform to share best practices affecting education. The theme of the conference’s latest edition was ‘Our Journey to Expo 2020’, and Dr Al Karam said that CORE – creativity, originality, responsibility and empathy – principles, arising from local education, would play a key part in setting the tone for the global event.
“We can start bringing the spirit of Expo into our schools today,” he said. “In the next 10 years, we will have AI teachers, who will understand us and cater to our individual needs, no matter how many kids we will have in the classroom — if we will still have classrooms, and if we will still have schools.”
He added that technology was changing at a pace that people were struggling to keep up with, while attitudes around technology were struggling to keep pace. Dr Al Karam even laid down a marker by saying that AI would become the “norm” and “not the exception” in education.
He said, “Having a strong sense of values and ethics will ensure that technology will be the tools that we use to serve the purpose of our lives — and not become the purpose itself. For most educators, our strength is not technology, but it people. Focusing on that strength means we have to rethink the purpose of education as we know it today.”
Dr Al Karam went on to highlight how the CORE principles would enable the effective study of sciences and technology by providing a balanced approach to education.
