Publish date: 20 September, 2024According to the AIPRM platform, the artificial intelligence (AI) market in education is estimated to be worth $2.5 billion by 2022, and that figure is forecast to reach $6 billion by 2025. In addition, the World Economic Forum notes that, “if implemented well,” AI could make learning more personalized.
The Software University (SoftUni), which has launched a new education program dedicated to artificial intelligence, is also thinking along these lines. Svetlin Nakov, who also held a special seminar on the topic this week, talks about its advantages and benefits. In addition to him, H512.com also asked questions related to the initiative to three GenAI models.
Svetlin, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly entering our everyday lives through the devices and apps we use, but at what pace is it entering education?
AI is entering education at different levels. At the student level, I’m seeing two groups – more advanced students are already using it as an assistant for homework, essays and projects in school. The more backward students haven’t even heard it exists.
At the teacher level, I observe a similar phenomenon – many teachers are already using AI tools for everyday teaching tasks, such as generating tests, homework, lesson plans and other daily activities. A proportion of teachers have not yet ventured into ChatGPT and similar tools.
At the school and university level , there is still a debate about what to do with these AI tools – when to allow them, when to disallow them, how to give assignments and projects in a way that encourages the use of AI but without overwriting. Should we learn to do by hand what AI does in seconds with a simple query? At a global level, there is no consensus in the scientific and educational community on these issues.
One well-functioning approach to using AI in schools and universities is the following:
Dear pupils/students, you have to develop this project (the assignment is given). You can use ChatGPT and other AI tools to complete your project under the following conditions:
1. You must document the steps you went through to get to the final result and the intermediate results of each step;
2. You must defend your project live in front of the instructor – you must answer any questions you have about your project, report, or solution in an argumentative way in oral form and your grade is written based on the answers and reasoning you give during the oral defense.
This approach works well because it catches students right away who are copying and have handed in a text that they don’t really understand (or haven’t even read the assignment condition that they copied into ChatGPT). The downside of this approach is that it is slow and difficult to apply to large groups of students or students, as it requires individual interaction with each of them.
At the science level, AI is already becoming an indispensable assistant in scientific research and development, from searching for scientific information, summarizing scientific results, and processing data to training specialized machine models to explore and investigate specific scientific problems and scientific simulations.
At our SoftUni BUILDER School for Future Skills and AI, we gently incorporate modern AI tools into the daily learning process and encourage students to use them consciously to expand their abilities and support their intellect, not as a substitute for it. It’s a daunting task, but we’re making progress in small steps every day.
This week, he organized an online seminar on AI, during which he talked about the place of AI in the modern world, as well as SoftUni’s new specialized AI program. What inspired you to head in this direction?
SoftUni AI is a project we’ve been working on for over a year now. We needed time and thought to research AI technologies and how to teach them, implement them internally at SoftUni, learn what works and what doesn’t, and then formulate and structure a lean educational program for AI application that addresses the needs of the mainstream. We were able to create an entire division at SoftUni to educate the common person (regardless of profession, age, or occupation) on how to use mainstream AI tools to be more effective in their work and daily lives.
You can sign up for a free course on the basics of using AI in everyday life and business via this link.
The SoftUni AI education program is suitable for students, employees, managers and entrepreneurs. They will all be able to learn how to use AI to be more productive, more efficient and faster in their work and daily lives.
Our cause is to reach across Bulgaria to help the development of Bulgarians as a society through education and use of technological progress. To learn to use AI every day and become smarter, more informed, do more in less time. That’s why we provide free basic AI courses and specialized more in-depth training. We want to reach a large mass – hundreds of thousands of young people.
Will you use AI in the actual teaching during the program? What will students learn and why is it beneficial to enroll?
We will use AI tools every minute during the teaching. SoftUni AI trainings are primarily practice and interaction with live AI tools with real life and work case studies, examples and projects. I’ve always been a fan of the concept of “learning by doing” because it’s only through a lot of doing that learners learn practical skills, not just get informed on a topic.
At SoftUni, we measure the results and effectiveness of a learning experience through the skills ultimately acquired, projects created, tasks completed and case studies solved.
SoftUni AI’s educational program is divided into three stages:
- AI Basics – free introductory training that provides a basic understanding of AI tools and examples of their application. This includes working with ChatGPT as well as audio and video generation tools.
- AI Fundamentals – the upgrade module consists of two courses(Prompt Engineering & AI Tools and AI Adoption) and lasts 4 months. Here, students can master creating working and successful instructions and queries for AI tools in more depth. Courses include working with Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and Midjourney, creating effective AI queries and much more.
- Specialized AI Courses – these provide even more specialized skills in applying AI tools to a variety of professional fields and are suitable for people with a variety of professions and occupations.
Anyone can sign up for the comprehensive AI skills development program at SoftUni AI. The AI Basics beginner course is free and available to anyone interested in getting a taste of artificial intelligence – out of curiosity, or to become more effective in their work and daily lives.
Explore more
We mentioned to ChatGPT that we’d be interviewing you, and he told us that a conversation about AI with you would be “pretty intriguing.” 🙂 So we asked him to ask you a question too. And it is this:
In your opinion, what are the most promising areas where AI can enhance human capabilities rather than replace them, and what skills should professionals focus on to succeed in such an environment?
It’s cool to see AI interviewing a human in practice. It’s something new and interesting, and it’s clearly working. I expect AI will soon be interviewing AI and a third AI will be judging the quality of the interview. Finally this is published in an autonomous AI media that runs without human intervention. Interesting times have come. Now back to the question.
Today, AI or elements of AI are used daily by almost 100% of professionals in certain fields such as marketing and design. In other fields such as business, finance, sales and programming AI is used by the majority of practitioners. The trend is for AI to enter digitized professions first (where work is primarily done on a computer), and gradually to extend to the rest. It’s a long way off, but the speed of development is great, and it’s pushing everyone from ordinary people to business leaders and politicians.
The skills of the future are all about the ability to think and reason logically, to make sense of and analyse information and to solve problems, and using AI is becoming a must-have skill alongside digital literacy and the use of English.
Thanks to AI, language skills are gradually losing value, but English is still important for thriving in modern professions and societies. Professionals from all walks of business and life need to learn how to effectively apply modern AI tools and integrate them into their daily work processes and habits to reap their benefits.
SoftUni AI helps everyone master this advanced AI tools through a well-structured curriculum, with lots of practice and real-world projects and assignments.
While the world is focused on GenAI models like ChatGPT, is it missing out on any other AI-related discovery that is important for our future?
AI models have been around for decades. Years ago, a specific model was developed for each task that directly solved that exact task and was very good at it, but only for that task. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and large generative models for generating images, video, and music and combining them into more complex universal models with multiple modalities (multi-modal models), the drive is to develop one model for all tasks.
Models such as ChatGPT and Claude are working in this direction and have already made noticeable progress. They take as input a task and data and generate as output a solution to the task.
In the future, I expect to see models related to other areas of modern technological advances that are not just text, image and video processing, such as robotics, autonomous robots, humanoid robots, robotic workers in construction, in agriculture, in manufacturing and in many other areas of the economy, an improvement in autonomous self-driving cars and a revolution in the transportation industry, new AI models in medicine, AI models for specialized scientific tasks and many others.
The trend in the AI industry is to move away from text generators and LLMs (large language models) to “smarter“ AI models that are capable of reasoning logically (with very good reasoning such as the ChatGPT o1 model), solving problems, acting autonomously on larger projects, and extracting more holistic results using both knowledge gained during learning and real-time information from the web, documents, and data fed to them at the time of query.
The concept of “AI agents“ and AI assistants has evolved quite a bit in recent times and will continue to achieve more and more impressive results. For example, in programming, AI agents (such as Cursor AI and GitHub Copilot) have advanced so much that they have become better than a human for small everyday tasks and are now an integral contributor to more advanced programmers and software companies.
Note: Svetlin Nakov says he didn’t use AI to write the text for this written interview because he wanted it to be “his text, with his authentic expression and his thoughts, not some generic answer to questions.”
We asked GenAI about Svetlin Nakov…
We asked three GenAI models – ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity – the same question: Svetlin Nakov is organizing a workshop on AI. Do you think it will speak to you?
Here are the answers in the original English, without editorial interference.
ChatGPT deemed the online seminar an “excellent opportunity”
Copilot also showed a photo of Svetlin Nakov
Perplexity thought the information about the AI workshop was incorrect
