Active use of AI by students is causing concerns among parents and lecturers alike. There is a risk that with neural networks providing the answers, students will stop learning on their own. Rather than blindly trusting AI, it's important to know how to verify its output. That’s why critical thinking skills will become even more important, believes Daria Kozlova, ITMO’s First Vice Rector and director for education at Yandex. At the same time, AI makes it possible to find a personal approach to every student. For example, Yandex Education products already employ the YandexGPT LLM, which adapts to every user. School students can now receive personalized tasks and better understand unfamiliar topics while studying for their Unified State Exam in computer science. According to the developers, YandexGPT is also popular with adults: they were more likely to ask for clarifications from the AI than from their mentors.
“Instead of making every student follow the same educational trajectory, a strong integration of AI into education will offer personalized learning for everyone. We at Yandex believe that the job of neural networks is not in providing a ready-made solution, but in explaining how one can be reached. It’s for this purpose that we are developing AI tutors on various subjects that will assist parents with understanding what their children do in class and for home assignments. Thus, AI won’t jeopardize the quality of education, but rather set a new standard for working with information and the necessary competencies,” emphasized Daria Kozlova.
What’s more, AI tools can prove handy not only for parents, but for university staff as well, said Andrey Shcherbenok, the founding director of the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Tyumen. For instance, at the Skolkovo School of Management, lectures on the biology of human behavior are delivered by AI lecturer Robert Sapolsky, named after the famous Stanford neuroscientist and trained on his books, lectures, and other works.
Another participant of the discussion, Ivan Stelmakh, a professor at the New Economic School, pointed out that the education system didn’t collapse with the advance of search engines, when students gained the ability to look for answers and solutions. The situation didn’t change with the spread of AI technologies, either. In order to inspire students to use neural networks as a tool in their studies, it’s important to provide the right motivation and create tasks that won’t be solvable without AI.
