How do we leverage AI and intelligent tools to make better decisions? How can we utilize intelligent technology to upskill our workforce and increase AI fluency? In our latest AI Ignition episode, Cynthia Breazeal, associate director of the MIT Media Lab and dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, shares the implications of social robotics in business and applying AI at scale. We're understanding a lot about what it takes to build technologies that can really deeply and meaningfully engage people of all ages to help them achieve deeply important goals in their lives. Cynthia Breazeal is the professor of media arts and sciences at MIT Media Lab where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are promising great things for learning. The potential here is impressive, but there also exist many questions and insecurities around deploying AI technology for learning: What can AI do? Where is it best utilized? And particularly: What does that leave for the instructional designer and other human roles in learning, such as coaching and training? We want to suggest that these developments are for the benefit of everyone--from organizational development strategy devised in the C-suite, via content creation/curation by instructional designers, right through to the learners, as well as coaches and trainers who work with the learners.

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. There is an imbalance in the education system during the Covid19 pandemic and most of the students don't even have access to educational tools and online learning platforms.

However, up until the COVID-19 pandemic caused a seismic shift in the education sector, few educational institutions had fully developed digital learning models in place and adoption of digital models was ad-hoc or only partially integrated alongside traditional teaching modes [1]. In the wake of the disruptive impact of the pandemic, the education sector and more importantly educators have had to move rapidly to take up digital solutions to continue delivering learning. At the most rudimentary level, this has meant moving to online teaching through platforms such as Zoom, Google, Teams and Interactive Whiteboards and delivering pre-recorded educational materials via Learning Management Systems (e.g., Echo). Digital learning is now simply part of the education landscape both in the traditional education sector as well as within the context of corporate and workplace learning. A key challenge future teachers face when delivering educational content via digital learning is to be able to assess what the learner knows and understands, the depths of that knowledge and understanding and any gaps in that learning. Assessment also occurs in the context of the cohort and relevant band or level of learning. The Teachers Guide to Assessment produced by the Australian Capital Territory Government [2] identified that teachers and learning designers were particularly challenged by the assessment process, and that new technologies have the potential to transform existing digital teaching and learning practices through refined information gathering and the ability to enhance the nature of learner feedback. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of the next generation of digital learning, enabling educators to create learning content, stream content to suit individual learner needs and access and in turn respond to data based on learner performance and feedback [3]. AI has the capacity to provide significant benefits to teachers to deliver nuanced and personalised experiences to learners.

E-learning and ed-tech startups are becoming a rage as more and more people are developing interest in new forms of education involving innovation. This change is productive, crucial and able to break the geological boundaries for gaining quality education. The rising number of COVID-positive cases has made it very clear that without social distancing, it will be very difficult to control the spread of this deadly virus. So, in order to overcome the challenges faced by educational institutions, online teaching tools are now being implemented across different levels of education among many schools and universities in the world. Digitization of education is viewed as a need of the hour in India, where not many institutions are equipped with the right tools nor do they have the specialized aptitudes to make the learning environment technologically advanced.

There is no doubt about the fact that the era we live in is the era of technology. Technology rules our lives and has made everything from shopping, communicating, ordering food, traveling to entertainment, fitness, comfort, and learning easier and more accessible for us. Let's talk about the role of technology in learning, it being the subject of interest to us. The last decade has seen Learning and Development (L&D) professionals making great strides in imparting better learning to corporate learners through the use of technology. For example, blended learning, microlearning, mobile learning, gamification, AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality), simulations, adaptive learning and even AI (Artificial Intelligence) are now being used to develop skills and knowledge in corporate employees. And, all this is possible because of technological advancements.

These elements have a diverse heritage in learning and management theory, and the way they are implemented will vary from one organization to another. Most or all of them are present, we believe, in every successful effort to raise the caliber of digital skills in an organization. When an initiative is designed effectively, the elements complement one another. Together, these elements create an immersive workplace environment that makes it easy to build new habits and learn new skills, continually reminding people of the progress they've made and the learning yet to come. Just as learning a new language is easier if you move to a community where it is constantly spoken, learning digital proficiency is easier if you are surrounded by other people who are fluent with the relevant technologies. But such widespread fluency is not the situation in businesses today. Training Industry, an organization and information source devoted to "the business of learning," estimates that organizations spent more than $362 billion on employee training and education in 2018 alone, reflecting a growth rate of 1.2 percent per year. Yet as Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer had already pointed out in 2016 in Harvard Business Review, organizations "are not getting a good return on their investment.

As Covid-19 continues to spread, the world has gone digital on an unprecedented scale. Tens of thousands of employees are working from home, and huge conferences, like the Google I/O and Apple WWDC software extravaganzas, plan to experiment with digital events. Universities too are sending students home. This might have meant an extended break from school not too long ago. As lecture halls go empty, an experiment into digital learning at scale is ramping up.

This week I'm in conversation with Henrietta Palmer, a strategic L and D professional and learning solutions manager at toury, a leading and innovative travel brand in the UK and an industry defined by the digital age and which companies have adapted to it. Henrietta is also passionate about the constraints corporate learning and development specialists is exist within. Sophie Bailey: 18:13 Unlike the wild budget utopia our state system education folk might think of when we think about learning and the corporate world. She also talks about going beyond Google searches and getting into the world of learning at work. Sophie Bailey: 18:57 Yeah, absolutely delighted to have Henrietta Palmer, a strategic L and D professional and learning solutions manager on the line, so welcome Henrietta. Hello, so for those who don't know Tui, formerly Thompson, is the UK is leading travel brand with 6 million holiday makers in the UK alone and with many more internationally and in the UK too. He has around 12 and a half thousand employees ranging from travel agents to cabin crew engineers and back office staff. Henrietta is responsible for ensuring Tui has the innovative development opportunities to drive the success of the Tui business. She has won numerous awards on behalf of her team, including the bronze awards in both learning technologies, team of the year and best learning technologies projects and in Henrietta's his own words. I'm a creative problem solver with 20 years experience in the field of digital learning. No year is the same.

An AI-based eLearning platform is a machine/system that possesses the ability to perform different tasks requiring human intelligence. It maintains the ability to create solutions to human-related problems, like speech recognition, translations involving different languages, decision making, and much more. Even in our mobile devices, an Artificial Intelligence engine is incorporated to help with studying our patterns in order to create likely suggestions during texting. Even though the AI-based eLearning platform hasn't become a standard learning approach amidst most learning organizations, there's a need for it. Although Artificial Intelligence is not of much use, it's on the way to making a positive contribution toward the effectiveness of eLearning training.