Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the education sector by enabling personalized learning experiences, intelligent assessment, and adaptive learning. However, AI algorithms often operate as black boxes, making it difficult to interpret how they arrive at decisions. This lack of transparency raises concerns about bias, fairness, and accountability in the educational outcomes generated by AI systems.
Explainable AI (XAI) is a subfield of AI that aims to make machine learning models interpretable to humans. XAI is especially relevant in the education domain, where decisions made by AI systems can have a significant impact on students’ lives. By increasing transparency and understanding of how AI algorithms work, XAI can enable more ethical and informed decision-making in education.
One area of research where XAI has been applied is in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). ITSs are AI-powered tools that provide personalized learning experiences to students by adapting to their individual needs, preferences, and learning styles. However, the effectiveness of ITSs depends on the accuracy and reliability of their decision-making algorithms. By using XAI techniques, researchers can develop ITSs that provide explanations for their recommendations and decisions, helping educators and students to better understand and trust the system’s outcomes.
The 5 Steps Academy Research Center is at the forefront of XAI research in education. The center is developing XAI-enabled ITSs that can provide explanations for their recommendations and decisions, allowing educators and students to understand how the system arrived at its conclusions. The center’s research also includes developing XAI techniques for intelligent assessment, personalized learning analytics, and multimodal learning.
In addition to improving transparency and accountability, XAI can also help to mitigate bias and discrimination in education. By providing explanations for the decisions made by AI systems, XAI can identify and correct biases in the underlying algorithms. This can lead to more equitable educational outcomes for students from diverse backgrounds and experiences.
XAI has the potential to increase transparency, mitigate bias, and improve decision-making can have significant impacts on the quality and equity of educational outcomes. The 5 Steps Academy Research Center is contributing to this important area of research by developing XAI-enabled ITSs and exploring the applications of XAI in other educational domains.