Page 6 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

INDUSTRY TRENDS david raths
AI’s Impact on Ed Tech
Artificial intelligence is making its way into a variety of education technologies. Here, vendors talk about their current and future work with AI in the higher education space.
IN 2015, WHEN Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ashok Goel experimented with using an artificial intelligence-based teaching assistant called “Jill Watson” to answer students’ questions in online forums, it opened a lot of eyes to the potential of AI on campus. But there remained well-founded skepticism about how algorithms would be deployed. For instance, in 2016 AdmitHub CEO Andrew Magliozzi contacted universities to ask if they would like to incorporate an AI chatbot into their recruitment and retention strategy. The reception was unenthusiastic: “They didn’t exactly say, ‘Hell, no!’” he recalled. “But most of them did not respond to our e-mails.”
Still, machine learning technologies are indeed making their way into many ed tech products — focused on both administrative tasks and teaching and learning.
Despite the initial cool reception, Magliozzi said things changed for AdmitHub as word got out about a successful pilot at Georgia State University. The Boston-based company also benefitted from a gradual change in thinking about AI, he noted. It now has 50 campus customers for its custom virtual assistant, including Arizona State University and California State University, Northridge. Institutions deploy it to engage students with text messages, make recruitment easier, increase enrollment, ease orientation and improve retention. Campuses are particularly eager to reduce their rate of “summer melt,” the term for when incoming freshmen fail to show up in the fall.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019
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