From second right: Edtech and AI lead at Gates Foundation, Jawad Ashgar; Founder and President of Darsel, AbdulHamid Haidar; Founder of The Education Partnership Centre and fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, Modupe Olateju; Founder and CEO of the Madhi Foundation, Merlia Shaukath; and CEO and Co-founder of Taleemabad, Haroon Yasin during the panel discussion yesterday. Pic: Rajan Vadakkemuriyil/The Peninsula
Doha, Qatar: Education experts have stressed the need to put human emotions in classrooms before building technology for children and teachers.
They noted that Artificial Intelligence, AI, is regarded as a knowledge accelerator, catalyst and partnership builder in education, that acknowledge personalised learning, enables teachers to spend more time teaching and less time creating lesson plans as well as measure learning outcomes better and more efficiently.
This call was made yesterday at an interactive workshop on the theme “Responsible AI in Education: The Evidence we need to build, scale and trust it – led by the Gates Foundation and Global Schools” at The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), a Qatar Foundation initiative.
The two-day summit held under the theme ‘Humanity.io: Human Values at the Heart of Education’ is on at Qatar National Convention Centre.
Edtech and AI lead at Gates Foundation, Jawad Ashgar opined that there is an urgent need to accelerate learning as there are millions of students who are not able to perform at the level that they are expected to.
“We want to make sure that these technologies are contributing towards learning and we also need to have very clear definitions about what contributes to improve in learning.” he said.
Also speaking at the workshop, the Founder of The Education Partnership Centre and fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, Modupe Olateju noted that the use of AI in assistive technologies has the ability to support children with learning difficulties but there are also risks about bridging the gap between the human brain and technology.
“Technology is not the problem, it’s usually how humanity chooses to use the technology that is the problem. The ability to think, reason, and answer very simple questions has actually been outsourced to tech because there’s this assumption that AI will give you a sharper answer, a clearer, more concise answer, which isn’t necessarily the truth because we must all remain human.” she added.
Examining in-person coaching which the crucial component of structured pedagogy programmes, CEO and Co-founder of Taleemabad, Pakistan’s largest education technology organization, Haroon Yasin said, “We began an experiment and had a data set of over 20,000 observations. We used this data potentially to train AI to listen into classrooms and give feedback to the teacher.”
Founder and CEO of the Madhi Foundation, Merlia Shaukath on her part, urged teachers to keep pushing for better classroom structures and gain more teaching skills. “Our primary focus right now is how we want our teachers to teach better and how to get our teacher coaches to coach better.” she said
Speaking on how technology helps education, Founder and President of Darsel, AbdulHamid Haidar said Darsel offers personalized learning that aligns with the curriculum to help kids learn through WhatsApp chat in partnership with schools.
Research according to the experts showed that the investment in 2022 on AI and education were about $2.5bn, it increased to $7bn in 2025 and projected that by the end of this decade it will be approximately $30-50bn.
