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Robots, AI and the End of Teachers as We Know Them? School Leaders Talk Technology and Predict the Future of Schools in the UAE. Part 4.

School leaders across Dubai and the UAE speak out on the future shape of our schools in the future.

by Jon WestleyJuly 4, 2020

Robots, AI and the End of Teachers as We Know Them? School Leaders from Dubai English Speaking College, Star International – Al Twar and Dunecrest American School on the Record.

In the fourth of our series of video interviews with school leaders on technology exclusively from SchoolsCompared.comTV^TM, we ask what the school of the future will look like.

Today, our children are already building and coding robots in BTEC Engineering and with LEGO® MINDSTORMS®. Already, in at least one school in the UAE, a robot can be found exploring the corridors and conversing with children. Is it too impossible to conceive of a day when our children will be taught by them?

Will there still be teachers and schools as we know them at all? In the next decade, will robots and VR have taken over many of the responsibilities of traditional teachers – or are schools going to remain much the same, even as the rest of society is increasingly transformed by AI and machines? Will schools get better? Or worse? And how quickly will our children begin to see major change? Or is asking this question actually asking the wrong one to understand what really matters in schools of the future?

In this series of videos we aim to build a definitive picture of the future of schools – from those who are running our schools. What is being done now? What are they planning? Has the rapid move to technology as a result of Covid 19 begun to focus minds and planning? Will exams still exist as we know them? Will more learning be completed away from school, at home, or in industry? Should AI, rather than teachers, be marking our children’s work, to free up their teaching time for more direct contact with our children? Too much screen time? Too little? Will schools in the future be better equipped to address the continuing disparity between the number of boys and girls studying subjects like engineering and the Sciences?

Let’s take another big issue today: class sizes. Class sizes matter to us as parents because they indicate just how much attention each child is likely to get from their teachers. In the future, technology, almost certainly, will become much more prevalent in the classroom with more on-line learning. Positively, this should mean much more individualised learning. If it works, any many are convinced it will, education should be much more able to accurately respond to child needs. And teachers should be freed up to have much more time to spend 1 on 1 with our children. Education will be fundamentally better, not because technology will replace teachers – but because technology will enable teachers to invest more time with each individual child. If Covid 19 and Distance Learning have taught us anything, it is that this sort of change could be coming quickly.

We will be releasing these guides in blocks of three video interviews. By the end of the Future School series we aim to have covered the broadest possible range of school types, from premium Tier Ones to value schools – and across different curricular or specialism. The aim will be to give parents the strongest possible idea of what will change, when, how – and what it will mean for their children.

SchoolsCompared.comTV^TMtravels to

Dubai English Speaking College
Star International School – Al Twar
Dunecrest American School

to get the lowdown on what matters – and what is set to transform education in the not too distant years to come.

The Questions we Asked …

We asked school leaders:

To explain their background and leadership experience
To describe the top 3 technological development coming down the track for schools in the UAE and their impact
What problems these technological changes will solve – and how?
To choose the single most important positive change coming to schools within the next 10 years and to explain to parents how it will transform the education of our children.

None of the school leaders we interviewed were made aware of how other school leaders answered these questions.

School Leaders Predict the Future of Schools in the UAE Part 4.