Students at a rural school in in La Ceja, Antioquía, Colombia. Photo: Charlotte Kesl / World Bank
Can Artificial Intelligence (IA) help address massive education gaps? The answer is a cautious and optimistic yes. 1.8 billion students in the world should receive a good education. However, half of them do not achieve basic reading and numeracy skills needed for life.
The learning crisis is so great that it could take decades to give everyone a decent education. But today, we are living in a unique juncture. Technology, and in particular AI, if used wisely, offers the opportunity to reach teachers, students, and schools with effective tools to enhance the educational experience at an unprecedented scale.
What is the potential of AI in education?
Post-pandemic, many countries are implementing policies to improve connectivity (85% of countries, according to the Global Education Monitoring Report 2023), smartphones are almost ubiquitous, and 95% of the population lives within mobile internet coverage. While connection costs remain a significant hurdle that the World Bank along with international organizations and governments are trying to overcome, in this dynamic context, more schools and students will be connected, and AI-based solutions can help address the crisis.
AI can assist along several dimensions, as summarized in the recent report on progress in Latin America and the Caribbean. AI-powered adaptive learning platforms, such as ALEKS, can tailor content to each student's needs, providing individual support and feedback. AI tools such as MagicSchool and Ummia assist teachers in creating engaging lesson plans, aligned with curriculum requirements and student needs. AI-powered feedback systems like TeachFX improve teachers' instructional practices and identify areas for improvement. AI-powered assistants improve early warning systems to identify students at risk of dropping out. AI is not without flaws – which are being addressed – such as deceptions (called "hallucinations"), the generation of meaningless or incorrect results, and biases derived from training data. But AI's potential to empower teachers and quickly provide students with a superior educational experience at scale is immense.
But for AI to truly improve the quality of educational experiences, a multifaceted approach is needed. First, affordable connectivity, hardware, and digital platforms must reach everyone. Second, continued investment in equipping teachers with the AI and digital skills needed to effectively leverage technology is essential. Third, AI literacy must be gradually but comprehensively incorporated into the curricula across subjects, while AI tools should facilitate learning in those same subjects.
To move the needle on learning, transformations must take place in education systems as a whole, which requires addressing institutional challenges ranging from bureaucratic inertia to the legal complexities that hamper large-scale acquisition of technology platforms.
The Human Factor: Teachers at the Heart
At the core of this technological revolution lies the teacher. In high-performing systems like Singapore and Japan, teaching is a prestigious career, and this social recognition correlates with education quality. Good teachers internalize the immense responsibility they have: their job is not just to teach, but to ensure that every student learns. When used wisely, technology allows teachers to focus on providing students with a richer academic experience, fostering the socioemotional skills vital for the future. When used wisely, technology allows teachers to focus on providing students with a richer academic experience, fostering the socioemotional skills vital for the future.
The key challenge to closing the education gap is to strike the delicate balance between technology and the human factor. The right balance depends on each country's level of development. In technologically advanced nations, AI is already being deployed to enhance the capabilities of already digitally proficient teachers. In middle-income countries, AI may already be facilitating personalized teaching in some classrooms. In poorer countries, providing basic digital tools and training to educators remains a challenge. In an extreme situation, in poor countries where there is a serious shortage of teachers, instruction can be provided by an AI-powered tutor with the guidance of a human tutor, as the Xprize competition demonstrated. This may be better than having no teacher or having one with few skills. However, that should only be a temporary fix. Technology cannot replace trained teachers nor match the impact of a good teacher with AI-amplified skills.
Why the urgency?
Inequality in education is rampant; middle-income countries are five years behind the OECD average and seven years behind Singapore on PISA scores. The concept of Learning Poverty highlights stark inequalities between countries: 90% of 10-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read and understand a simple text, a figure that is 56% (pre-pandemic) in Latin America and less than 3% in the Nordic countries. Within countries, inequalities are also evident: PISA scores are highly correlated with socioeconomic status, urban-rural division, ethnicity, and disability.
Even worse, technology may be amplifying these inequalities. AI is already transforming classrooms in California and South Korea, while millions of children in low-income countries remain out of school and thousands attend low-quality schools. In a typical low- or middle-income country, today there are elite high schools offering computer science courses, and students are using ChatGPT. At the same time, there are children in schools with no internet access and teachers with little training. In the same country, 21st century schools coexist with schools that seem to have stagnated since the beginning of the 20th century. Not only is there a learning crisis, but technology, with its great potential to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to access a good education, is becoming more of an unequalizing factor.
A wave we need to ride
The global learning crisis is a failure of societies. There are huge inequities in education outcomes. In this context, technology opens up a range of possibilities, and to harness technology to improve education outcomes, the human element remains a key element. Education is based on human interaction, on the connection between a student and a good teacher. And technology, given the right conditions, can amplify the impact of well-trained and dedicated teachers.
There is a huge demand for change given the magnitude of the needs. But there is also an offer of change in technological progress that we see day by day. It's a wave we need to ride if we are to give billions of children today the opportunities they deserve.
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