Personalized Education in the Artificial Intelligence Era: What to Expect Next

The objective of personalized learning is to design an effective knowledge acquisition track that matches the learner's strengths and bypasses his/her weaknesses to ultimately meet his/her desired goal. This concept emerged several years ago and is being adopted by a rapidly growing number of educational institutions around the globe. In recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), together with advances in big data analysis, has introduced novel perspectives that enhance personalized education in numerous ways. By taking advantage of AI/ML methods, the educational platform precisely acquires the student?s characteristics. This is done, in part, by observing past experiences as well as analyzing the available big data through exploring the learners' features and similarities. It can, for example, recommend the most appropriate content among numerous accessible ones, advise a well-designed long-term curriculum, and connect appropriate learners by suggestion, accurate performance evaluation, and so forth. Still, several aspects of AI-based personalized education remain unexplored. These include, among others, compensating for the adverse effects of the absence of peers, creating and maintaining motivations for learning, increasing the diversity, removing the biases induced by data and algorithms, and so on. In this article, while providing a brief review of state-of-the-art research, we investigate the challenges of AI/ML-based personalized education and discuss potential solutions.