What’s Next with AI?: My discussion upon AI's future and responsible use

There is an increasing trend toward the prominence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the educational landscape. Thus, AI can be a major collaborative and personalization tool in teaching while also raising certain issues within the class. This reflection will discuss the future of AI adoption’s impact on teaching and its nuances, based on the Educause New Horizons Report 2025.

In the foreseeable future, most teachers will be able to integrate technology in their curriculum with AI as a facilitating tool. This is based on the fact that in previous years, teachers, especially the older generation, would face difficulties in using and utilizing technological tools such as AI due to the lack of training (Pang et al., 2021). This was quite on par with my case, where I struggled to familiarize myself with new technological tools, which could mean that for older teachers, who might not have prior tech literacy. However, recent years' empirical studies show that schools have been pushing the agenda for teacher training in AI usage; thus, the educational staff would be equipped with sufficient technological literacy in order to truly adopt AI. For instance, learning how to incorporate AI in administrative tasks for my own class, such as lesson planning or rubric creation, would ease my workload greatly, especially near the mid and end-of-term timeframe. To summarize, AI could be a helpful assistant in smaller tasks.

Meanwhile, in the far future, AI might be a core in teaching and learning assistance. To predict, most classroom environments would have AI as their facilitator, teaching assistant, and even personal tutor. This can be explained by the rapid growth of AI in the years to come, which correlates with the frequency of usage. Thus, classrooms in the far future might have AI as not just a feature, but an indispensable part of it. For instance, the Learning Management Systems (LMS) for conducting online classes and assignments might integrate AI in order to assess students’ performance via their submissions, while providing virtual assistance via feedback and suggestions. This would mean asynchronous learning benefits most from the adoption of AI.

However, it should be noted that although AI could be more prominent, human intervention in using AI is also needed. AI governance in the classroom is crucial for creating an effective and authentic classroom, and this can be achieved by providing guidelines and facilitation in class. While using AI has its own set of merits, human-centered classrooms should still be maintained as every goal and learning objective begins with learners’ needs, wants and gaps. Thus, teachers, who manage the classroom, should take into consideration the proper support for students to not be reliant on AI for their class and homework and encourage responsible AI utilisation. From my reflection, I have been demonstrating for my students how to use AI responsibly in writing and would give them guidelines on using the tool; this benefits both them and me greatly, as I can still grade human-written essays, while the students can have extra aid in brainstorming and grammar-checking.

To conclude, AI adoption would offer merits for the educational landscape as an assistant in smaller management tasks for most teachers in the near future, and might be enhanced to an indispensable competency in the far future. However, one should be mindful of AI governance to encourage responsible AI use.

References

Pang, C., Wang, Z.C., McGrenere, J., Leung, R.A., Dai, J., & Moffatt, K. (2021). Technology Adoption and Learning Preferences for Older Adults: Evolving Perceptions, Ongoing Challenges, and Emerging Design Opportunities. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.