- An Arizona charter school will use AI instead of human teachers for two hours a day on academic lessons.
- The AI will customize lessons in real-time to match each student’s needs.
- The company has only tested this idea at private schools before but claims it hugely increases student academic success.
One school in Arizona is trying out a new educational model built around AI and a two-hour school day. When Arizona’s Unbound Academy opens, the only teachers will be artificial intelligence algorithms in a perfect utopia or dystopia, depending on your point of view.
The Unbound Academy’s unconventional approach to teaching needed approval from the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, which it received in a contentious 4-3 vote. Students in fourth through eighth grade will be enrolled in the program, in which academic lessons for two hours a day will be delivered by personalized AI, which will rely on platforms including IXL and Khan Academy. The idea pitched by Unbound is that it will make students happier and smarter, with more time to explore life skills and passions.
During those two hours, the students will be going through adaptive learning programs. While they study science, math, or literature, the AI will track their progress in real time. Depending on their performance, the AI will then adapt the curriculum’s style and difficulty to help them succeed. That might mean slowing down and spending more time on some subjects or upping the ante and making some parts of the educational plan more difficult.
While academic lessons are condensed, the rest of the day is filled with hands-on workshops in areas like financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and public speaking. Instead of traditional teachers, students are guided by mentors who lead these sessions and help develop practical skills that aim to go beyond the classroom.
Academic AI
Unbound Academy has tested this concept elsewhere in similar programs at private schools in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha Schools. They claim that students in these programs learn twice as much in half the time. Arizona officials are now betting this success will work in public schools, albeit charter schools instead of standard educational institutes.
This isn’t Arizona’s first foray into AI education. Arizona State University (ASU) worked with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT as a kind of faculty member. The difference is that ASU has AI helping students to write academic papers and aiding professors in running more complex simulations and studies. It’s not actually running any classes. What Unbound Academy is doing is closer to a trial run in the UK. London’s David Game College is running an AI-taught class as part of its new Sabrewing program, bringing 20 GCSE students into the program, which employs AI platforms and virtual reality headsets to guide their learning.
The idea that AI allows for hyper-personalized learning and can make for more successful students is, of course, appealing. The extra time freed up for life-skills workshops is another selling point, preparing students for challenges outside the classroom. But it’s all too easy to see the shadow cast by what’s lost without human teachers. AI can’t replace the mentorship, encouragement, and emotional support that define a great teacher, at least not in any of its current forms.
AI may be able to boost a teacher’s ability to help students, but it’s objectively ridiculous to claim AI as it is now can be better than a human teacher. It may be cheaper for a district to turn to a for-profit company in the short term, but it’s a shortsighted way of considering the value of educators. For now, students at Unbound Academy will be the pioneers of this new approach. Everyone will learn something from the result, one way or another.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
