Overcoming Anxiety About AI-Enabled Experiences
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize education by offering personalized learning experiences, improving productivity, and promoting inclusivity. However, integrating AI into educational experiences can also cause anxiety among educators, who worry about job displacement, ethical concerns, and the impact on critical thinking skill development. One way to address these concerns is by applying design thinking principles when designing AI-enabled experiences. Design thinking is a human-centered approach focusing on empathy, ideation, and testing to solve complex problems.
By centering design efforts on our learners, we can understand their needs, challenges, apprehensions, and goals to create experiences that resonate with them while better positioning ourselves to serve next-gen learners whose expectations of AI experiences will continue to grow as the technology becomes more pervasive in other aspects of their lives. Considering Amara’s Law: “We overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” starting student-centered design in the short run can help us better anticipate the long-term impacts, further reducing anxiety.
For example, one can imagine an AI-enabled chatbot assistant that creates a personalized learning experience, providing curated, just-in-time expertise to support learners. By supplementing existing support resources with an integrated AI experience, we can provide a low-stakes, high-impact means for students to interact with the technology by addressing their need for support resources when needed. On the faculty side, this experience can increase productivity and provide teaching assistant-level support by monitoring student progress, offering supplemental course content, and assisting with reoccurring tasks. Reducing routine tasks can “free up” time, potentially enabling more student-to-faculty interactions made possible by a technology some feel threatens human interaction.
Assuming the concept is desirable and technically feasible, another way to combat anxiety is to educate users about the technology before implementing this type of experience. By learning about how AI works, its limitations, and understanding the intended use case, learners and faculty can make informed decisions about using and interacting with AI technologies. This knowledge can help alleviate fears and misconceptions about AI and provide a neutral environment to experiment and learn.
By embracing the potential of AI to enhance learning experiences and focusing on the opportunities it presents, users can develop a more positive attitude towards AI in education. Design thinking can help address anxiety about AI-enabled experiences by focusing on user needs, addressing their concerns, and designing experiences that include AI literacy. By applying these principles, we can create AI-enabled learning environments that are engaging, effective, and inclusive.
Inspiration & Further Reading
Abdous, M’hammed. (2023, March 21). How AI Is Shaping the Future of Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed.
Chen, Charlie. (2023, March 9). AI Will Transform Teaching and Learning. Let’s Get it Right. Stanford University HAI.
Spotify Design Team. (2019, October 1). How Can Design Thinking Build Trust in the Age of Machine Learning? Spotify.
