With the rising popularity of Chat GPT, the use of AI across all industries is becoming more and more frequent. But the big question is, where does that take tutoring? Should we expect the tutoring industry to be heavily affected by this eerily advanced tool, or will AI serve as a complement to teaching? Ever since covid, online tutoring has become all the more popular as students and teachers all over the world switched to remote learning and teaching. This change resulted in the rapid development and emergence of new remote learning tools – from video teaching platforms to websites providing online teaching instruments to help tutors. Sure enough, these developments have made it so much easier for tutors to teach online. Yet it’s hard to see the end of this – at which point do these developments stop being a complement and start being a threat to the tutoring industry? Perhaps a quick look at the pros and cons of using AI in tutoring will lead us to the answer…

The Pros:

1. Personalized learning experiences

There’s no denying it – AI can be used to help tutors save time. AI algorithms can analyze student data much faster and more accurately than any human brain can (yep, as annoying as that is). This means it has the ability to generate individualized learning experiences tailored to every student's needs. Thus, tutors can use AI tools to create personalized lesson plans and assessments that can help students address their learning goals more efficiently.

2. Automated Assessment

Creating cool personalized teaching content is far from the only AI ability that tutors can make use of – it can be used to assess students’ knowledge as well. With the help of AI, tutors can automate the assessment process, making it faster and more accurate. AI-powered tools can analyze student data and provide feedback in real-time, enabling tutors to identify areas where their students need more help. This can save time and improve the effectiveness of tutoring sessions. What’s there not to like?

3. Unprecedented access to data

Finally, AI can provide tutors with data-driven insights that can help them improve their teaching practices. By analyzing student data, tutors can identify trends and patterns that can help them better understand their students' learning needs. Also, tutors no longer need to spend hours searching for data about a specific topic on the internet – they can simply input a request in Chat GPT and receive very specific search results momentarily (what differentiates search engines and Chat GPT is that the answers provided by the latter tend to address the question very directly).

Isn’t that just great! Well… wait till you hear the flip side.

Because of its incredible learning abilities, AI has acquired the skills to provide virtual tutoring – services that can be used in lieu of tutoring coming from a real human. The first example of software that has performed this job well that comes to mind is Duolingo – with 575 million users. Yes, let that sink in for a moment. 575 MILLION! Anyone who’s used this fun gamified app knows, it incorporates a sophisticated algorithm that identifies and records your mistakes, then feeds them back to you until you perfect them as you progress through language exercises. It also has an embedded microphone feature that enables users to practice pronunciation, and it is able to tell if you got the sentence correct. But Duolingo is not quite there yet. AI is becoming more sophisticated as you read this, and it’s only a matter of time before an AI -powered software will be able to provide all the personalized tutoring services that a human tutor can.

Don’t panic – we are still a long way off from that happening, and even when AI does acquire supertutoring abilities eventually, there is no guarantee that that would signify an end of the tutoring practice. The idea of having a machine control your language a;eanignporcess is not appealing to everybody, and there are definitely aspects of human-to-human teaching that an AI software simply cannot provide. That human connection and understanding through sympathy and the desire to help a student is not something an AI will ever be able to replicate (at least not in the short term!), it is up to us tutors to capitalize on our strengths and harness AI as a useful teaching tool where appropriate.