Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
- An Arizona charter school will use AI instead of human teachers for two hours a day in academic lessons.
- AI customizes lessons in real time to meet each student’s needs.
- The company has only tested this idea in private schools before, but it says it dramatically increases students’ academic success.
A school in Arizona is testing 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.
Unbound Academy’s unconventional approach to teaching required approval from the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, which it received in a disputed 4-3 vote. Students in grades four through eight will be enrolled in the program, in which academic lessons for two hours a day will be delivered by personalized AI, relying on platforms including IXL and Khan Academy. The idea presented by Unbound is that it will make students happier and smarter, with more time to discover life skills and passions.
During these two hours, students go through adaptive learning programs. While they study science, math or literature, the AI will follow their progress in real time. Depending on their performance, the AI will adapt the style and difficulty of the curriculum to help them succeed. That could mean slowing down and spending more time on certain subjects or upping the ante and making some parts of the educational plan more difficult.
While the academic lectures are condensed, the rest of the day is filled with practical workshops in areas such as 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 that this success will work in public schools, although charter schools instead of standard educational institutions.
This isn’t Arizona’s first foray into AI education. Arizona State University (ASU) worked with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT as a type of faculty member. The difference is that ASU has AI that helps students write academic papers and helps professors run more complex simulations and studies. Actually, it does not run any classes. What Unbound Academy does is closer to a test in the UK. London’s David Game College runs a Class of AI as part of its new Sabrewing programme, bringing 20 GCSE students into the programme, which employs AI platforms and virtual reality headsets to guide their learning.
The idea that AI enables 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 is too easy to see the shadow of what is lost without human teachers. AI cannot 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 enhance a teacher’s ability to help students, but it is objectively ridiculous to claim that AI can now 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 short-sighted way to consider the value of educators. For now, Unbound Academy students will be the pioneers of this new approach. Everyone learns something from the outcome, one way or another.
