The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says 42 is the answer. But what is the question?
For Russell Miller it is: how can we use AI to personalise our learning process?
Is AI a threat or an opportunity? For Russell Miller, whose team is focused on creating the learning programmes of the future, it’s very much a chance to make a positive change.
"We’re examining how AI can help make learning relevant to our personal needs by understanding what we know already," says Miller, whose team at Imperial Executive Education – with, he says, “one foot in the future” – builds executive education programmes.
He uses the British love of tea as an example. "As a lifelong coffee drinker, it would be useful for me to go through a whole course on tea-making – whereas a regular tea drinker would be extremely bored and might only get something from the final afternoon." Which is where personal adaptive learning comes in, he says. This technology uses AI to establish what learners don’t know. “It’s a really cool way of accelerating impact, particularly for companies who want to take their people through repeat compliance courses every couple of years,” he points out.
Ultimately, rather than spending 90 minutes clicking through answers simply to get to the end, the hope is to use personalised adaptive learning to make this kind of training more effective – and to build out for non-technical areas. Miller hopes that more efficient ways of running courses could eventually be applied to abstract subjects like leadership.
"Despite the occasional scepticism that AI will put us out of jobs, you get a lot of pockets of real enthusiasm and a strong mandate to go off and try it."
The team is also researching the impact of company culture on AI in learning environments, and how to get everyone on board. "There’s a matrix of AI adoption in terms of mandate and innovation and you see it across Imperial, too, which is fascinating," he says. "Despite the occasional scepticism that AI will put us out of jobs, you get a lot of pockets of real enthusiasm and a strong mandate to go off and try it. It’s really positive."
Russell Miller is Director of Learning Solutions and Innovation at at Imperial Executive Education, part of the Imperial Institute for Extended Learning.