July 05, 2018
Furthering the revolution in the education sector, IBM is extending its AI, Watson’s, capabilities to create more personalized learning experiences.
Last week, during the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, in Chicago, IBM announced that it has joined the education publishing company, Scholastic, and the education technology company, Edmodo, in a strategic partnership. In the corresponding blog that the technology giant published alongside its public announcement, the Vice President Chalapathy Neti has written-
“Expanding our reach through these new partnerships way will give educators the resources they need to ensure that there is no gap between what a student is expected to learn and what he or she has actually learned. IBM AI paired with Scholastic and Edmodo’s existing educational infrastructures streamline this process by highlighting student-specific needs within the context of curricular standards.”
With Scholastic, IBM plans to expand the Watson Education Platform’s library with content that meets the curriculum standards. So that, the users of the platform can have ‘multiple, levelled articles and media’ that matched with the requirements of students at ‘every skill and interest level.’
IBM is also attempting to leverage its AI’s capabilities to help the teachers better understand the learning progress of each student and recommendations as per individual’s abilities. Because of this, the company has proposed to use the Watson Education Cognitive Library to improve content tagging based on each student’s performance.
On the other hand, the partnership of IBM and Edmodo is said to bring major improvements to the services for the Edmodo users. Neti writes, “ Classes that have integrated Edmodo will be able to see recommended multimedia content that aligns to the grade level, age and subject matter interests of students.” Additionally, IBM will also leverage the Watson Tutor technology that will allow the registered teachers to select a package of topic-specific questions for the students for better learning through assessments.
This is not the first time IBM has made major investments in the education sector. Its aforementioned education AI, Watson, which the company developed back in the year 2010, has always remained in the news for its radical feats. For example, in February 2011 it was involved in a historic event by becoming the first AI to participate in the American quiz show Jeopardy! Also, last year, the AI-powered an application for kindergarten students to help the children learn difficult vocabulary through Sesame Street characters in videos and games.
It is noteworthy that IBM also has partnerships with the world’s biggest education company Pearson, and Watson is used in many of the Pearson’s higher education offerings.
With all the tech leaders including Google, Apple, and Microsoft, trying hard to establish themselves in the education sphere, the days of the outdated education-system appear to be numbered.
Dotsquares, too, has made a humble attempt to contribute in this revolution through its, now nationally accredited platform, ScooNews, which is a part of the international education application –ScooTalks. To discover more ideas around eLearning, explore our portfolio here.
Resources:
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2018/06/using-ai-to-close-learning-gap/
https://edscoop.com/ibm-watson-artificial-intelligence-scholastic-edmodo-curriculum
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/watson/
