The figure of the teacher has evolved over the millennia along with various pedagogical methodologies, starting with Socrates’ RMA, which is still surprisingly relevant today. The model that some teachers manage to embody and transmit remains at times decisive throughout the student’s life. Numerous pedagogical practices using digital tools have been tried out in recent decades, with mixed fortunes. On the one hand, teachers, traditionally accustomed to face-to-face teaching and textbook support, have not always been willing to adopt new technologies; on the other hand, teachers themselves maintain strong doubts about the effectiveness of digital technologies, which have often been ousted from school environments, starting with smartphones. The entry of artificial intelligence into the school casts doubt on the very figure of the teacher, who has been bypassed and supplanted by tools deemed by students as more than reliable and, therefore, a substitute for both teaching and the effort to be produced to learn and achieve results. Thus, a debate has now opened on the replacement of the teacher by artificial intelligence.
It must be said that already for centuries the lecturer has been “automated” and his work partially replaced by the books themselves, which have assumed an effective complementary role to him. Recently, online education, industrialized by telematic universities and specialized companies, effectively uses video recording of lectures, going de facto to replace in asynchronous mode the teacher’s live lecture. Moreover, in some compartments, online video tutorials are highly effective.
Today, the challenge is to pursue a goal that is as realistic as it is forward-looking: to enhance teacher action precisely through AI, certainly not to replace it. To do this, we need to delve into the areas in which AI can help improve the performance of the various actors in teaching-educational action, that is, both students and their teachers. Artificial intelligence, for example, can be used to select, organize, segment, and make usable by teachers the enormous video assets available online, transforming them from an uninformative risk to an educational resource. The teacher can access editorially curated video collections or select videos, which thanks to AI are summarized and divided into short chapters, which in turn can be organized by the teacher into presentations composed of several video cores, of short “video concepts.” In this way, web video resources become useful for creating video lessons in which the lecturer retains his role as guide and narrator, but is “extended” by the power of the universal video assets, selected, summarized, and articulated thanks to artificial intelligence. Some forms of artificial tutors are already emerging, ensuring personalized conversational lessons, in some cases undoubtedly effective, as in the case of foreign language learning or professional languages. Such technologies can be used in the classroom by the teacher as digital assistants. The artificial tutor adapts to the specific needs of each student, correcting him or her and proposing a specific instructional path suited to his or her needs and abilities, at each stage of study, and can thus be a valuable aid in “extending” the training action that has hitherto been the legacy of teachers. But while some experts, including Bill Gates himself, question the role of the human teacher, this remains fundamental. In building personality, so-called “soft skills,” in creating and managing a social environment, the teacher and the school itself as a community remain irreplaceable. What may change with the emergence of AI is the role of the teacher in teaching hard skills, that is, skills in the various school subjects, which may change following the evolution of a society increasingly equipped with intelligent agents, that is, applications of AI capable of carrying out actions and procedures at the behest of humans. Teaching in the age of AI becomes a new profession; the teacher must extend his or her tools by using artificial intelligence itself both to simplify his or her most repetitive tasks, to enhance the way he or she teaches, to adapt teaching subjects to the new cognitive context in which AI is an increasingly decisive presence, and to teach students how to relate to artificial intelligence itself.
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