By Sukanya Ganesh — Oct 11, 2023

📖 Catalyzing Inclusive Education: AI for Special Needs

AI is transforming education for special needs students by using adaptive learning, webpage interactions, and AI based learning tools to enhance and personalize their experience.

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AI can play a significant role in improving education for people with special needs by offering personalized and tailored solutions to address their unique learning challenges. AI-based design and development is often driven by the needs and behaviors of the “average user,” and people with disabilities may fall outside of this experience. Here are several ways in which AI can assist in special education:

ADAPTIVE LEARNING

Adaptive learning, or adaptive teaching, is an educational method in which AI is used to customize resources and learning activities to cater to the unique needs of each learner.
This is done via rigorous analysis of a student's performance data, after which the pace and difficulty of the course material are adjusted by the AI algorithm in order to optimize the learning process.
Many companies are incorporating adaptive learning to improve the way content is delivered. One popular example is Duolingo, a language-learning app that provides listening, reading, and speaking exercises for learning around 40 different languages. The app uses AI to help ensure that lessons are paced and leveled for each student according to their performance.

WEBPAGE INTERACTIONS

AI-based tools can also be used to help with interactions by people who are unable to see content. Tools like Apple Siri, Amazon Echo and Alexa provide ways of interacting with content through a spoken dialogue model.
A "seeing" AI, for example, could help students who find the contents of a webpage to be too visually stimulating.
Building this type of accessibility into systems that everyone uses may also reduce the stigma (and possibly the cost) associated with having to purchase separate accessibility tools or apps.

AI-BASED LEARNING TOOLS

Spontaneous participation of the learner is essential for any learning process to be effective. Intelligent Tutoring model was developed by Carnegie Mellon University to evaluate the concentration level as well as the mood of the child, to develop a learning session that suits that particular child.
Widex’s Evoke is an intelligent hearing aid powered with AI technology which can help hearing-impaired children attend classes without any difficulty.
The award-winning application Otsimo has several success stories in this field, using AI for its speech therapy application. This aligns filters after children complete exercises, with the filters being part of a reward mechanism. Machine learning helps with voice recognition so the app can understand what the children say and fill their progress bar.

While AI has the potential to greatly enhance special education, it's important to use these technologies thoughtfully, considering ethical and privacy concerns, and to ensure that they complement, rather than replace, the role of qualified educators and specialists who work with students with special needs.