How to apply AI language modelling in online classrooms for young learners

This informal CPD article, ‘How to apply AI language modelling in online classrooms for young learners’ was provided by Novakid, an international community of young English learners, designed to boost English learning at schools by giving kids a safe place for real-life English practice with other kids and teachers from all over the world.

Many educators around the world initially shunned large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft Bing Chat, fearing that the artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology would prompt cheating, stifle critical thinking and displace the human role in teaching. However, as the technology has become more pervasive in consumer and business software, teachers are increasingly realizing that this advanced technology can enhance education rather than impair it.

Educators are now using LLMs to transform the teaching and learning experience, streamline administration, support students with greater individualization and assess learners continually to achieve better outcomes.

A survey of 1,002 K-12 teachers commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation in the US illustrates this growing popularity. The research found that 51% of the teachers surveyed had used ChatGPT, with 40% using it at least once a week.

Augmenting the educator role

AI can be seen as a partner to a teacher, rather than a standalone product. AI can serve as a co-pilot for a teacher, helping them create engaging and personalized lessons to streamline learning and enhance the experience for students.

These applications are already showing impressive results when used to support speaking, communication and creativity, prompting students to speak twice as much as they did before. Intelligent tutoring systems and adaptive learning algorithms or chatbots can address industry challenges such as increasing costs and the need to broaden language diversity for more inclusive lessons. Furthermore, integrating AI-based tasks into the ESL and K-12 curriculum for children can lower the cost of content production and improve efficiency.

Importantly, as more edtech providers integrate AI into their solutions, educators will need to embrace these tools to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving global market.

5 ways to apply AI to enhance online learning   

Here are five ways for curriculum designers, instructors and teachers to best to leverage language modelling in ESL and K-12 learning:

1. Streamline course design and content creation

Teachers can use AI language models to create content that is engaging, creative, interactive and fun for students at little to no cost. Importantly, teachers can brainstorm a topic with students in real time, prompting the AI model to build a story based on the elements selected by the students.

Integrating AI language models into the classroom for younger audiences can help a teacher generate content for the lesson on the go according to student preferences.

Augmenting the content generation and story-building process in this way can help break the inertia that students often experience when conceptualizing ideas or creating storylines, which is not relevant or critical to the learning process, but can take time. This increased student choice and personalization gives students a greater sense of ownership in their learning.

The pressure of facing a blank canvas can stifle engagement, making speaking and thinking creatively difficult and daunting for many ESL students. When the AI model starts the story, it shifts the focus from the conceptualization to the creative aspect of storytelling while allowing the student to still control the subject and narrative to keep them engaged and interested.

Offloading the conceptualization task to AI gives students and the teacher more time to interact, talk, read and ask questions based on the result of the story, keeping the focus of the lesson on the learning process. When implementing this practice in the “free talk” lessons, students found the lessons more enjoyable: they spoke a lot and had lots of fun being creative.

When designing course curricula, teachers can use LLMs to generate educational content and study materials, and they can gamify the learning process by creating quizzes or word games. Teachers can customize and adapt these materials to fit their specific teaching goals and the needs of their students and do so at scale.

2. Personalize lessons and learning experiences

AI can help to contextualize instruction in a manner that students understand and better relate to based on their individual preferences. Creating a personalized curriculum can inspire younger kids to learn by making the lessons interesting and tailored to the learner’s individual needs and interests.  This level of individualization is typically time-consuming for teachers, but with assistance from technology, this has become a far less resource-intensive process.

By analysing student data and performance, adaptive content ensures that every student is challenged at an appropriate level based on individualized factors, with the AI creating personalized learning paths and recommending tailored resources, assignments and assessments.

The AI model can proactively make recommendations to address any identified gaps in student knowledge and provide targeted interventions, such as additional practice exercises or supplementary materials to support continual learning and improve education outcomes.

Beyond lesson personalization, instructors can use predictive AI to identify when learners start to fall behind or fail to understand specific concepts taught in the lesson. Integrating AI into the content creation process unlocks opportunities to develop adaptive content, which adjusts the difficulty level of content and the pace of learning based on the student's assessed performance and skill level. Going too fast or too slowly is often a concern; with AI, learners and teachers can progress at their individual pace.

3. Improve student engagement and interaction

AI can help structure discussions during ESL lessons and generate ideas if a student or teacher gets stuck. It can help create more engaging speaking practice lessons, which makes it a promising tool to support teaching in real-time.

AI language modelling is becoming more adept at storytelling, creating stories on the fly to act as a co-author and generate plots for advanced work in class. When teachers use AI as a co-pilot in a lesson, it can help adapt the lesson flow to the students’ individual interests, making the experience much more engaging and boosting retention.

For example, the teacher could ask students to create a story with characters. The children decide what happens next by giving inputs to the AI engine to build the story for them. This AI-assisted storytelling process saves time and helps to produce a more creative and completely original story with free-flowing dialogue during these interactive sessions.

When we allow students to emotionally connect with something they like, it increases speaking time. Kids enjoy learning when they can discuss things they care about, play with characters they care about, or learn in a gamified learning environment based on topics they care about.

AI can assist the student and teacher in tailoring these stories, character behaviours and gaming experiences to the interests of a particular child. And in our experience, in these instances, AI significantly raises engagement, which positively influences retention rates.

Furthermore, AI language modelling tools can help children socialize with other learners to improve ESL learning through real-world interactions. For example, AI can prepare a list of questions in English that a child may ask their peers online, using topics of conversation based on their hobbies or common interests.

4. Provide academic support

In addition to its ability to create personalized learning plans for students that cater to unique needs and learning styles, AI can improve overall academic performance by providing academic support at an individual level outside the classroom or lesson environment. For example, teachers can incorporate AI-powered intelligent tutoring systems into their online courses to supplement their teaching and provide additional academic support.

Intelligent virtual tutors can provide instant feedback and guidance to students doing homework, answering questions and explaining concepts learnt in the lesson in a personalized way. Curriculum designers can also use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to develop chatbots or virtual assistants that can respond to student queries when the teacher is unavailable and provide students with personalized, step-by-step explanations that help them understand the study material.

5. Automate and enhance grading

Teachers can also use NLP-powered AI language tools to analyse written assignments more efficiently, and AI can automate the grading process for quizzes and exams. In these instances, AI tools can identify strengths and weaknesses in the graded work. AI testing ensures that assessments can be conducted more regularly, and, when combined with adaptive content, can make learning more effective in class.

Applying AI technology in these areas, including AI tools that check for plagiarism, saves time for teachers, allowing them to focus more on in-depth feedback and discussions with students based on the identified areas where they need improvement and assistance.

In conclusion

AI continues to advance and transform traditional approaches to teaching and learning by making personalized and adaptable teaching methods possible. Incorporating AI language modelling into online ESL and K-12 education requires a considered strategic approach that should augment the teaching role, enhance the learning experience and more accurately identify areas where students are having trouble, to ultimately improve student outcomes.

We hope this article was helpful. For more information from Novakid, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively, you can go to the CPD Industry Hubs for more articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.