As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a staple of everyday life around the world, recent discussions have focused on its potential role for education, with Greece considering ways to integrate it into its national school curriculum.
Currently, Greece is taking its first steps to bring AI into classrooms through the AI4edu program, which is being co-funded by the European Union. This initiative introduces two interactive assistants: Study Buddy for students and Teacher Mate for educators.
The initiative brings together six organizations from four EU member states, including the Athena Research and Innovation Center (Greece), Luleå University of Technology (Sweden), the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (Cyprus), Drumcondra Education Center (Ireland), and Ellinogermaniki Agogi (Greece).
The Study Buddy assistant engages with students through natural language, both in text and voice, acting as a mentor, teacher, and exercise creator. It assists with explaining concepts, interactive learning, summarizing, editing written assignments, creating quizzes, and grading answers. Integrated with school textbooks, it provides tailored support.
Teacher Mate is an assistant that communicates with educators in natural language and features a dashboard where teachers monitor student progress, generate tests, and provide feedback. Equipped with tools for lesson planning, curriculum design, and term explanations, Teacher Mate is a resource that combines textbook material with additional teaching tools.
According to Nikos Panagiotopoulos, a Sociology professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a primary benefit of integrating AI in education is the ability to facilitate personalized learning.
Another advantage is immediate feedback. Tools leveraging machine learning can quickly assess student work and provide constructive feedback, saving valuable time for both teachers and students.
However, the use of Artificial Intelligence in education also creates significant concerns amongst the scientific community. One key issue is the risk of information overload. With vast amounts of information made accessible by machine-learning-powered search engines, it’s easy to become overwhelmed.
Furthermore, AI platforms generate massive amounts of data from teacher-student interactions, posing a challenge for educators who may lack the expertise to interpret and use this data effectively.
