ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN STUDENTS’ LEARNING PROCESS.

The role of Digital Technologies in the Schools’ environment has become essential, especially considering the nowadays Covid-19 context, in which mobility has been limited.

This underlines undoubtedly the need of change the classroom life along with the way of learning and teaching. New ways of thinking and revolutionary practises are indispensable in order to collaborate and use new technologies in always smarter way.

Educational technologies consist in hardware or software tools which facilitate and improve student’s learning process together with the teaching approach. Nowadays, it is important to highlight that students are always more at ease with this type of instruments which are omnipresent in their daily lives. Therefore, this familiarity must be exploited in order to transmit profitable uses of digital technologies in students’ learning process, supported by teachers which are not only a set of notions but also guides that are able to stimulate and increase students’ engagement and willingness to learn. As the pedagogist John Dewey had anticipate, the key is the learning by doing, which can be better applied in this time thanks to the use of artificial intelligence with all that it entails. In fact, AI provides a personalised and more inclusive training, ensuring universal access for all students. Considering the educational domain, an important research has been led by UNIVPM as far as the use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies employed for didactic purposes. To this end, ScoolAr, a new educational platform, has been developed aiming at improving students’ learning in the art domain. It has been proved that students who have used this platform, combined with teachers’ traditional methods, that kept on maintaining their fundamental role, have acquired deeper knowledge in shorter time, increasing their motivation in the learning process. Although it was tested only in the art domain, there are many other tools which are more and more used in schools with the objective of reaching the same purpose. 

Some doubts have been raised concerning the use of AI for students’ learning, considering the fact that teachers will never be replaced by machines and their traditional methods are definitely the best way to spread knowledge. The point is that it is not a struggle between the human being and the machine, but it should be a cooperative work between these two entities in order to obtain better results. Talking about AI, it is relevant not to forget that it is always the human being that programs and builds algorithms. For that reason, human skills and competences have to be always trained as a means of solving every new task that our daily life makes us face.

It is certain that systems which use AI are objectively more efficient and faster than humans in managing and interpret high number of data, in making complex calculations and automating processes. From one hand, Algorithms of Machine Learning and Deep Learning have solved a set of problems that probably a long time ago we would have considered impossible. On the other, most of the time, human beings are not able to detect the cognitive process of the machine. Thus, it is important to maintain alive emotional skills, especially in educational contexts, because a correct use of AI combined with developed emotional skills can ensure more efficient results with respect to youth education. 

Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist who has focused his research on Emotional Intelligence, declared that emotional factors weight, on the average, 88% when people have to make important decisions. Young people, in their learning process, should also learn to make important decisions for their lives and for the social context in which they act. 

In conclusion, it is true that the educational system must be certainly supported by AI which has been proved to be very useful and productive in relation to knowledge and students’ motivation. Nevertheless, the role of teachers has not to be forgotten, because they can increase the potential of students’ emotional intelligence, by developing more conscious and skilled personalities.