Future of After-School Education with Neelakantha Bhanu

Every Learner Is Different: So How Do We Create Education That Adapts to Them? Our latest blog explores how, for many young people, particularly those with SEND, the traditional approach to education can create barriers to learning that have little to do with a student's actual ability. Perhaps the question shouldn't be how do we help learners fit the classroom? But how can we create classrooms that can adapt to the learners within them? This blog explores: 🪑 What an adaptive classroom looks like 💔 Re-engaging learners who have fallen out of love with learning 🤖 Could AI make education more adaptable? and more Read more below https://lnkd.in/ek565kRP

“Technology is a tool. It’s not the mission.” That message from Julie Young’s conversation on The Learning Curve captures one of the most important lessons for education in the age of AI. Drawing on nearly three decades of experience Julie reminds us that meaningful innovation has never been about the technology itself. It is about how we design learning around personalization, mastery, relationships, and student needs. Several ideas from the conversation especially resonated with me: • Mastery matters more than seat time. • AI should enhance learning, not replace the productive struggle required to build skills. • Academic integrity cannot be solved by detection tools alone; it requires better assessment design and teachers who truly know their students. • Relationships scale better than rules. • The future of education should move us from mass standardization toward mass customization. Julie also makes an important distinction in the current conversation about AI: schools and teachers are not becoming obsolete. Their roles may evolve, but the need for belonging, human connection, thoughtful feedback, and trusted educators remains essential. This is a thoughtful and hopeful conversation about what becomes possible when we stop asking whether technology will replace education and start asking how it can help us design education more intentionally. Thank you, Julie, for continuing to push our field to rethink what learning can be. 🎙️ Listen to the conversation: https://lnkd.in/g4x-JVCF #OnlineLearning #AIinEducation #PersonalizedLearning #MasteryBasedLearning #EducationLeadership #FutureOfEducation

🤖📚 Teaching Kids With AI: Best Tricks and Tools in 2026 🚀 AI is transforming education—but the best learning still happens when technology and human guidance work together. Discover how parents, teachers, and schools can use AI to: ✅ Create personalized quizzes and worksheets ✅ Generate smart flashcards for faster revision ✅ Turn lessons into fun educational games ✅ Help children learn at their own pace ✅ Encourage creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving At PlayPuzzle, we believe AI should make learning more engaging, interactive, and enjoyable—not replace teachers. Our platform combines AI-powered study tools with educational games to help children build confidence while having fun. 🌐 Explore PlayPuzzle: https://playpuzzle.in 📖 Read the full blog: https://lnkd.in/di-hvgZV 💬 How do you think AI will change the way children learn over the next few years? Share your thoughts in the comments! #PlayPuzzle #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #KidsLearning #EducationTechnology #SmartLearning #EducationalGames #Teachers #Parents #LearningThroughPlay #EdTech #FutureOfEducation #StudySmart #PersonalizedLearning #STEM #DigitalLearning

The conversation around AI in higher education often focuses on risk. But the real opportunity lies in applying AI in ways that genuinely improve the student experience. One of the biggest challenges facing universities today is meeting student expectations for timely, personalised support in increasingly flexible learning environments. Students expect access to help when they need it, whether that's academic guidance, technical support, coaching or administrative assistance. That's why I found the early results from Ask Alvie so interesting. Rather than replacing educators, Ask Alvie is designed to complement the learning experience by providing contextualised, always-on support grounded in learning design and educational best practice. It helps students find answers in the moment, while reducing routine queries and freeing educators to focus on higher-value interactions. The early outcomes are encouraging: ✔️ 4% higher assignment submission rates ✔️ 12% higher pass rates ✔️ Increased student confidence and self-directed learning For me, the most important takeaway is that successful AI adoption isn't really about the technology. It's about understanding student needs and using technology thoughtfully to create more accessible, supportive and engaging learning experiences. How is your institution approaching AI-powered student support and learning innovation? #HigherEducation #AIinEducation #EdTech #StudentSuccess #LearningDesign #DigitalLearning

Recently, I’ve been seeing more posts and articles popping up about the combination of low student attendance at lectures and increased student use of GenAI. The evidence is often anecdotal but it does chime with the experiences that my academic connections have shared with me. I don’t believe that we can or should focus on policing-out GenAI. We need to concentrate instead on providing learning experiences that are as inclusive, well-designed, and meaningful as possible, so that students want to put in their own effort. Much of what I read still seem to assume that in-person learning is necessary for deeply engaged learning. I think that this is true for some subject areas and some cohorts of students but online learning can often be better. Some of the most richly engaged and meaningful student learning I’ve been involved in, or have observed, has been on fully online courses. So, if students are missing lectures because they need paid work to survive, are commuting, are Disabled, or having caring responsibilities, then offering more online learning can be an excellent answer to poor in-person attendance. How do we achieve the kinds of online learning that will keep students deeply engaged and persuade them that it’s worthwhile to struggle with ideas rather than offloading to GenAI? There’s no single ‘best’ practice answer but I think there are some key questions I can draw out from the literature and my experiences .... (read the rest of this blog at the link in the comments)

Interesting findings that will resonate with all my peers who are researching AI in education and coaching: Generative AI is not naturally very good at tutoring - it is designed to give answers and suggest solutions. You have to really cajole it to listen* to the user and hold back answers - and even then it fails a lot of the time. (*or diagnose misconceptions in this case)

I love the idea of independent research checking the claims of AI tutoring! Here’s an interesting qualitative study on whether AI tutors actually do what we would call tutoring. The answer here appears to be no. Even with prompting, the tutors don’t meet the criteria of what tutoring should look like. The only promising thing here is that at least the AI models didn’t provide (many) false answers for the simulated learners.

Can AI Tutors Actually Teach? We Measured It We ran 779 simulated tutoring conversations to test whether AI models can teach, not just answer. We simulated an 8th-grade math student with a planted misconception (drawn from documented algebra errors), six frontier models acting as the tutor, and a rubric for what counts as teaching. Three things stood out: 1. Out of the box, models don't tutor. Without a tutoring prompt, they handed the student the answer in 97% of conversations. Zero successful tutoring outcomes in 298 tries. 2. A tutoring prompt helps, but unevenly. Answer-giving dropped sharply, but no model was good at both halves of the job, diagnosing the misconception and holding back the answer. 3. Price didn't predict quality. The cheapest model (about $0.002 per conversation) scored best on the strict rubric. One that costs 12x more did worse. The models were rarely factually wrong. We found 3 false statements across all 779 conversations. The problem is that handing over answers isn't teaching, and there's no standard way for buyers to tell the difference ahead of time. Funders are putting a lot of money into AI tutoring. Independent, ongoing evaluation is inexpensive by comparison, and it's the gap they're best positioned to close. Full methods, results, and caveats: https://lnkd.in/gJC9NhyV

EdTech Pulse | 21 July 2026 - Five Stories Shaping the Classroom 1. Anthropic just launched "Claude for Teachers" - free access for educators, built for lesson planning and differentiated instruction, plus an AI literacy course developed with the American Federation of Teachers. The AI-in-education race just got a new frontrunner. 2. The UK Department for Education is putting over £5 million more into Oak National Academy - funding the revised national curriculum and new AI tutoring tools for schools. Government-backed EdTech is no longer an experiment. It's policy. 3. England's education leaders are pushing harder for digital exams. Their argument: fears around on-screen testing are overblown, and modern assessment systems can actually improve efficiency and resilience. The paper-and-pen era is on notice. 4. Classroom monitoring tools are dividing schools. Screen tracking tech is raising real questions about how far "student safety" should stretch before it becomes surveillance. Data governance is now a front-line EdTech issue, not a footnote. 5. Khan Academy and other AI tutor providers are redesigning their systems to make students think, not just receive answers. The pendulum is swinging from automation back to genuine learning. Insight: The pattern across all five stories is the same: EdTech is past the "let's just add AI" phase. The real work now is making sure AI strengthens teaching, protects student data, and deepens learning instead of replacing the people and thinking that education actually depends on. Which of these shifts do you think will matter most for classrooms in the next 12 months?

Can Artificial Intelligence transform the future of education? Traditional learning models often struggle to meet the needs of every student especially in large classrooms where personalized attention is limited. Adaptive Learning AI is changing that by creating personalized learning experiences, identifying knowledge gaps early, and helping educators support students more effectively. In our latest case study, discover how a large university system leveraged AI-powered adaptive learning to achieve remarkable results: Key Outcomes 1. 45% increase in course completion rates 2. 28% improvement in average student grades 3. 50% reduction in dropout rates 4. 100,000+ students positively impacted every year From predictive learning analytics to personalized content recommendations and real-time performance monitoring, this case study highlights how AI is reshaping higher education and improving student success at scale. Read the full case study on Medium: https://lnkd.in/dr5Yfi5K At Nooral.ai, we help educational institutions harness the power of AI, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics to create smarter, more engaging, and future-ready learning environments. How do you think AI will shape the future of education? Share your thoughts in the comments! #ArtificialIntelligence #Education #EdTech #AdaptiveLearning #MachineLearning #LearningAnalytics #HigherEducation #DigitalTransformation #EducationalTechnology #StudentSuccess #Innovation #NooralAI