Episode 129-Exploring the Future of AI Avatars in Education

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting episode of VR in Education, where we dive deep into using virtual reality for teaching and learning. In today's episode, I'm going solo. I had the luxury of beta testing Victory XR's new AI avatar platform. And I want to dive deep into that experience, compare it to non-Avatar AI, and talk about the future direction that AI avatars might play in learning and development, and moreover, in how teachers deploy teaching experiences to their students.

First of all, let's talk about non-Avatar AI. I've tried a couple platforms where it's a chatbot experience, and I want to share with you some of my thoughts. The first platform that I've used in schools with students as well as supporting teachers has been the platform School AI. So, the website, if you're interested, is www.schoolai.com. When you sign up, you can get a free account provided you have credentials that show that you are a teacher.

School AI offers a plethora of options when it comes to trying to set up and then deploy AI as a learning experience for your students. So don't get me wrong, I think a lot of schools are at the phase where they're currently just using AI to help them with lesson plans. They're using AI in the background to help create quizzes. School AI has those tools and features. However, it's promoting heavily the use of AI to support learners.

So it has options like you can create a space that's an AI co-pilot, whereby it's knowledgeable on a certain career or a certain subject within like science or history. And then you can deploy that to your students as you're diving deeper into a unit. it. The other thing I like about school AI is you can also customize and create your own experiences so you could gamify it.

For example, I've created one where I've told the AI chatbot to pretend it was two people and my students had to interview those two people to figure out who was the real astronaut or who was the real doctor and the other was a fake.

The second non-Avatar AI platform I want to talk about is AI Tutor Pro. This is by a company called Contact North. In this platform, you can have two options. One, you can pick a topic, pick its level of understanding. So are you an elementary student with a basic understanding? Are you a high school student? Or you can even get into college and university categories.

Then you have one of two choices. Once you pick a topic, like I picked food webs, it could grill you with questions that you have to answer and then provide you feedback on the quality of those answers. Or it could educate you on that topic. And so you could bounce between these two. So a little bit less freedom, AI Tutor Pro, than School AI, but nevertheless, acting more as a support, acting more as an assistant, or a tutor, if you will.

Next, as I said before, one of the things that I wanted to unpack and do with this episode was was my experience beta testing avatar AIs. And one platform that's all in and heavily invested in creating not just... Boxes that you type in and interact with text, but literally 3D human representations within a virtual world, which we might call AI avatars, is Victory XR. So I got to beta test their platform and I want to talk about it.

So one of the things when you go to Victory XR and you sign up for this is that it allows you to create a new AI avatar experience. And you click on that button, and it walks you through a number of things. So one of the things that it does is it asks you, for example, what the subject is that you want, what's the name of the lesson, it allows you to narrow down a grade.

And then you give it a script as well as the opportunity to put in questions that it will ask the student and images almost to act as a non-linguistic anchor for the student to look at. So I created one and it was on food chains. And what I did was I actually used ChatGPT to help me make the script so that that was quick and easy. And the emphasis wasn't on necessarily teaching.

It was just on review of food chains. So when you experience this and you deploy it and you launch it as a student, right now there's only two environments that you can pick. One is the classroom, the other one looks similar to a classroom, but they have in their pipeline a future where you can pick more contextually relevant 3D environments. Like you could pick if you're studying food chains in the desert.

Down the road, it looks like VictoryXR has plans to allow you to do this in a contextually relevant environment like the desert. Which will be key, I think, because right now, just sitting there, listening to an AI avatar talk to you about food chains and then throw up some pictures and enable you to interact with it, to ask questions in a sterile environment like the classroom is nowhere near as powerful as if you were in a tropical rainforest.

Or in my case, if you were literally studying the history of World War II, you're in like the trenches within a warlike setting. And then you could ask like a soldier that's there beside you in the trenches questions based on the contextually relevant experience. I really like how Victory XR has made the platform simple to set up and use for teachers.

And it's banking on the notion that when teachers get a tech tool like this, that they really want to put their imprint and their direction on how it's given and deployed. Right now, I see a lot of not necessarily AI avatar stuff, but I do see a lot of AI chatbots, and many of them aren't as customizable as this. So this really gives the teacher the ability to make sure that it fits and connects directly with the curriculum that they're trying to teach.

A second platform that is preaching and giving the ability to have AI avatars is EngageVR. EngageVR has rolled out a product called School AI. And what it is, is it has already, EngageVR, a number of amazing and relevant 3D spaces.

Spaces so within these 3d spaces now they have characters and these characters right now are quite famous people like nicholas tesla you know jfk neil armstrong and they're plopped in most cases into a contextually relevant environment like neil armstrong i believe is on the moon and so as you're looking at this fantastic space i.e the moon neil armstrong's there and you can You can ask him questions, you can probe him inside the VR experience. So I have a number of thoughts on AI in general.

What's the benefits to doing this as a teacher? Well, one of the biggest benefits that's been touted is it's a way to hopefully try and personalize the learning experience for the student because essentially they're given their very own teaching assistant. Some of the questions then that students might ask maybe aren't possible in a huge class of like 30 to 40 students.

There just isn't time. Whereas if you deploy an AI assistant, especially if it's a 3D avatar, which looks a little bit more realistic and therefore personable to the student, they may start to ask questions like, I didn't understand this. And the AI could explain it back to them. The other thing is, many students comment about the judgmentalness or the judging of the sheer act of asking a question. Students might be reluctant because the professor or the teacher is grading them.

And if you ask too many questions, that teacher might develop a bias towards you that, oh, gee, they really don't understand this. And then when they're marking your essay or your long answer questions on a test, that could play into fact and act as this judgment system. And so students don't want that and therefore often might be reluctant even to ask the question in the first place.

Whereas if you you have an AI teaching assistant, they're non-judgmental and there might be a greater capacity to ask those questions because you feel like you're not being judged and then marked on a report card or whatnot. One other benefit that I see either AI avatars or even just non-Avatar AI chatbots, the hardest thing about teaching is trying to move your craft from it being disseminating information that might be through a lecture or through a textbook reading or a video,

and then testing a student on it, and then moving on to the next learning outcomes. comes. So the more tools a teacher has in regards to trying to provide a variety of different learning activities, including now the idea that we might be able to deploy an AI avatar experience so that students can see it from a different perspective. They can start to ask questions, maybe that they aren't able to in the first go round, which is by the teacher.

But I also have some thoughts on drawbacks related to AI avatar tutors and AI avatars in general. One is, I still don't think they're as good as a human tutor. Human tutors and human teachers are constantly looking for things like nonverbal signals that would allow them maybe to differentiate or to pivot. it. I used to be a tutor for chemistry and one of the things I like to do is to look at the student's eyes.

AI avatars aren't able to do that and therefore they can't read these cues, these human cues that might give you insight into whether the student is understanding it, what direction you need to go next with the student. And so, you know, that's key. The teacher still should be in the driving seat. Another drawback is the following. There's this notion in learning science called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it has to do with our cognitive bias.

So people who start learning something, they're still at a very low level or low ability as far as knowledge acquisition. They're no longer, they're not an expert. They're not even an intermediate. It's going to take time. But what happens is we get this overestimated competence. So think of the Victory XR experience where I'm listening to the AI avatar teacher. It's explaining to me about food chains and pictures are popping up. I asked it a couple questions.

I started to feel kind of competent about it. But this is just like one learning journey. And I think the over-reliance on them to think that maybe, okay, we totally get it now, That's worrisome. Learning is this complex journey where we need a variety of different experiences. We need a lot of practice for us to go from a low ability to a high ability.

One other possible drawback that I see with AI avatars or even just AI chatbots that don't have a 3D avatar in front of them is this notion of hallucinations. Hallucinations mean that But when you ask a more open model of AI like ChatGPT, where it pulls information from this giant source, it sometimes gets it wrong. And we say it hallucinates. It comes up with misinformation.

Now, this is easy to control, especially when you're allowed to customize your AI avatar or your AI chatbot, and you can quarantine it and say, I only want you to pull information from, you know, my notes or this textbook, and don't allow it to try and seek information outside of that controlled closed system. When you do that, there's way less likely that it's going to come up with and think about hallucinations.

So where do we go from here? I still have this notion that how best do we use and deploy AI avatars? Well, I already mentioned this. I think a teacher needs to be cautious that they still are the primary architect of the learning experience. And when When a teacher builds a unit or a course, they need to understand that crafting a variety of different learning engagements and experiences will make that learning journey much more powerful.

So they're still in control and the teacher still should be the one making sure that this journey that the student goes through is oversaw or. Supervised heavily by a human teacher who can read nonverbal signs and can completely understand, the human who's hopefully having some challenges and struggles as they go through the learning experience. So AI avatars, AI chatbots shouldn't be the sole giver and deliverer of the learning experience. The next thing I worry about is the following.

We are taught, of course, that students should practice. So that practice, again, when it's varied, so it could start with like a practice test or a worksheet. Deploying an AI avatar is one of the different ways that they get to practice. And this time it's transactional where they have to ask questions and get feedback.

I think this is a powerful tool in a tool belt where teachers need to start to give differentiation and to give experiences that are more than just one way. I want to give you an example of what this might look like. I was helping a teacher deploy a unit in middle school science where they had to understand the relationship between the sun, the earth, and the moon. And the first thing that we decided to do was to take them into a virtual reality experience.

It was Engage. They were on the moon and we gave them some experiences where they had to manipulate and sort and order the position and the angle of the moon and see what impact that had on the earth. Talked about tides. We also looked at the different you know how's the sunlight affected when the moon blocks part of the Sun onto the earth. And then after they went through that amazing contextual learning experience.

We got them out of the VR headset and we took them to school AI and they had to have this transactional two-way conversation with an astronaut. And we programmed or prompted the astronaut with information necessary for the curriculum that they were trying to study. So here's what we saw. The students were incredibly curious and they had a lot of questions because they just finished this super contextually relevant visit to the moon.

And they were probing, they weren't asking like short little yes, no, they were literally writing out sentences of information because of the phenomenon that they had just been exposed to.

Whereas if students have zero context or zero experience they're going to have a hard time trying to even ask one question to the AI chatbot or the AI avatar so as I said before Victory XR it seems to me that this is the direction that they are going is they're going going to allow then more VR spaces to be more contextually relevant so the students are way more curious.

And therefore, when that assistant is sitting there on the moon, you can start to deploy and ask questions because something came up that you were doing that sparked interest and spark curiosity. I know if you've ever tried FrameVR, FrameVR actually allows this right now. The only thing is FrameVR doesn't work in a VR headset with the AI avatars this way. So if you're on a computer, you can go to a 3D space for framevr.io.

You can, with the paid version, you can deploy an AI avatar and you can type in questions. So it would be much better if we could just speak to text so that it was quick and more natural, but you could with framevr.io, you could do this now on the computer. Not in a VR headset yet, but maybe that's on their pipeline. Line. Closing thoughts.

Right now, there's still a lot of use case with AI avatars based on knowledge or content dissemination and making sense of low level knowledge. And that's okay. I'm not saying we have to start with the basics. My hope is we eventually are going to realize that there's deeper thinking and use cases of AI beyond just helping a student make sense of low-level content and low-level knowledge. One example is this whole notion of imposters.

So what if you could have on the moon, you know, two astronauts, they both say they're Neil Armstrong, and you had to probe them with deep interrogative questioning to figure out which one was the real Neil Armstrong and which one was an imposter. That level of engagement with the AI avatar is at a much deeper thinking level than just having the AI avatar help you make sense of some of the low-level questions that you have.

That's it for now, ladies and gentlemen. If you want to extend your understanding and knowledge of AI avatars, as well as just the use of AI in general, let me give you a couple of recommendations. I recently just listened to an Ed Surge podcast dated August 29th, where they do a fantastic job. The title of the podcast is When the Teaching Assistant is an AI twin of the professor.

And they do a brilliant job of interviewing students as well as professors and how these are being deployed in higher ed. Another episode, as far as podcasts go, that I want you to check out is I recently did on my podcast, VR and Education, episode 125, I actually had a great conversation with the CEO of Victory XR, Steve Grubbs, about their deployment enjoyment of these new AI avatars. So as always, everyone, thanks for listening, and I wish you a wonderful day. Bye for now. Music.