As AI reshapes how we find information, solve problems and work, the Center for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences (CETLS) at IIIT Hyderabad is asking a more fundamental question: what happens to the way humans learn? Set to launch on September 5, the interdisciplinary centre seeks to bring together psychology, learning sciences, cognitive science, and technology to design new methods, and tools to help people learn better in an AI-native world.
Try and try, till you succeed. This was a learning mantra for most of us growing up that laid emphasis on not giving up but learning from our mistakes to move ahead. The learning process was intrinsically associated with some amount of struggle. Technology however has steadily reduced some of that friction. At first, search engines made finding information almost instantaneous. Then came videos which replaced some of our need to read. And now, generative AI can explain, summarise, write, translate and answer our questions in seconds.
For those who grew up with these technologies, this is simply the world they know. Prof. Vasudeva Varma, who is leading the new Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences (CETLS) at IIIT-H, draws attention to the distinction between being a digital native and an AI native. “We are all digital immigrants. We were not born in the digital world. We were born in the analog world,” he says, referring to those born in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The generation growing up today, however, is different. Instead of turning to a search engine to find a collection of documents which may (or not) contain a response to their question; they ask AI to give them an answer directly. Voicing a concern shared by many an educator, Prof. Sandeep Shukla, Director, IIIT-H remarks, “We feel concerned about whether the knowledge we impart to our students being at the fingertips of the students if they have access to generative AI, is relevant to be imparted any more. We also worry about how to test the knowledge and understanding of students through homework assignments when GenAI can produce the answers perfectly well.”
According to Prof. Varma, the convenience of easy access to AI comes with a pressing question that needs to be addressed, “If machine intelligence is rising rapidly, are human cognitive abilities at risk of declining or stagnating? So far, human intelligence has led to better machine intelligence. Now, it’s payback time where machine intelligence should also help human intelligence to grow.”
The case for slow learning
At CETLS, the basic premise is not to resist AI but to figure out how AI can help humans retain and strengthen basic learning abilities such as attention, curiosity, critical thinking, problem-solving and the capacity to struggle with a difficult idea until it is assimilated as one’s own. An important distinction that the center seeks to make is between merely using AI and learning with AI. Illustrating with an example, Prof. Varma says that if a student asks an AI tool to solve a problem or write an essay or say, explain a concept and simply accepts the answer, the technology may have helped complete a task. “But the learner may not necessarily have learned anything. We want to explore the opposite possibility, that AI does not only make learning effortless, but makes it better.”
This would mean bringing back what Prof. Varma terms “slow learning” – the deliberate, experiential process of doing, questioning, experimenting and thinking deeply. “Unless you do something with your hands, participate in an activity, engage experientially with something, it won’t stay in your mind,” he reasons, adding that while an AI-assisted student may produce a flawless assignment or perfect scores, when faced with an unfamiliar problem, the underlying understanding may not be deep enough to cope. CETLS therefore wants to explore learning environments that put the learner through what Prof. Varma calls a “productive struggle” – a space that is neither so difficult that the learner gives up nor so easy that there is no learning happening.
A Research Centre looking beyond specific EdTech platforms and products
It is easy to imagine CETLS as another technology platform or an AI-powered learning product but Prof. Varma is quick to correct that impression. “It is a research centre that is going to constantly experiment creating new tools, new platforms, new methods, and new processes,” he clarifies. The starting point here therefore is not the technology but the learner. Praveen Garimella, Professor of Practice, CETLS agrees. According to him, while AI can carry more people to the edge of a field, at the center they are more concerned about what happens at the edge. This in turn depends on what we ask humans to do. “Schools and colleges produce too few people who go on to do original work. The question worth asking is what makes someone a genius? And can we grow more of that, now that AI is in the room?”
The centre intends to draw on learning sciences, cognitive science, psychology and AI, with the goal of creating new learning methods, technologies, tools and environments. Questions such as what a particular learner needs, what cognitive science tells us about memory and attention, what psychology tells us about motivation, which teaching methods actually work, how technology can support those methods, and how AI can be designed to challenge learners rather than simply provide answers, will be brought together under one roof. “The center’s goal is ultimately to understand what an optimal learning experience might look like for different kinds of learners and then build the technology to enable it,” elaborates Prof. Varma.
Four Verticals of the Centre
CETLS will work across four broad areas: K-12 education, higher education, executive education and third-age learning. The target learners in each area may be very different, but the underlying question remains the same: how can people learn deeply and remain capable of learning throughout their lives?
Catch Them Young
In the K-12 space, CETLS plans on exploring how children can move beyond rote learning towards practical, experiential learning. “Whether the subject is mathematics, science, language, history or technology, the question is how learning can become something children do, rather than something they merely consume,” states Prof. Varma. Instead of a blanket ban on AI in the classroom, the centre wants to investigate how it can be used to strengthen children’s own thinking, from learning a new language to developing mathematical reasoning and critical thinking. The idea is to partner with schools, allowing researchers to understand how learners actually learn and use those insights to design better methods.
Accessible high-quality higher education
Higher education presents a different challenge. High-quality college and university education remains concentrated in a relatively small section of India’s population. “Technology has already expanded access through online courses and digital learning, but we are seeing an opportunity to go further,” remarks Prof. Varma. One way the center is exploring this is via personalised learning. Think of an AI learning companion who can understand a student’s strengths and weaknesses and dynamically create or adapt learning material to keep the student in that productive zone between frustration and ease. “Instead of simply answering questions, the companion could ask questions, probe understanding, identify gaps and push the learner to go deeper,” explains Prof. Varma emphasizing that the intent of the companion is not just to help students pass exams but to help them achieve mastery. This could particularly be significant for students outside the most privileged educational environments.”This would be those who may have the motivation and ability to excel but lack access to individualised attention and high-quality mentorship,” he says.
Executive Education
The third vertical addresses a problem that is already being felt across workplaces: skills are becoming obsolete faster than ever. The fear of AI completely replacing humans may be unfounded but the truth is that technology is disrupting jobs and making upskilling and reskilling essential. However organisations do not always have the resources or capability to provide meaningful learning experiences at scale. Here too, CETLS sees AI as potentially part of the solution to a problem created by AI. ”The important distinction here is that the AI in this scenario will be designed especially for learning, very different from everyday AI,” explains Prof. Varma. The AI tool in this case will work as a learning companion, guiding the person through the process of acquiring a new skill. It could provide scaffolding, encouragement and the occasional push, while ensuring that the learner actually performs the task. “For an engineer, for instance, that could mean writing, deploying, testing and scaling code rather than merely reading about it. The emphasis remains on doing,” says Prof. Varma.
The Third Age of Learning
Perhaps the most distinctive of CETLS’s four areas is what Prof. Varma calls third-age learning or learning after retirement. For a large portion of the working class, retirements sounds like a death knell. The center would like to emphasise that retirement does not mean the end of learning. “India’s population is fast aging and yet our country has relatively little infrastructure designed around the intellectual, social and emotional needs of senior citizens. Public spaces and libraries are disappearing and many older people find themselves confined at home,” rues Prof. Varma. At the center, continued learning is being viewed as one way of changing that trajectory. “Longevity and learning are intertwined. The moment your learning dies, your cognitive abilities decline,” he says.
Learning for later life however cannot simply replicate the techniques and methods designed for younger learners. Fluid intelligence may decline with age as can short-term memory and the speed at which new information is absorbed. But older adults also bring stronger crystallized intelligence, richer cognitive structures and greater emotional stability. In order to create suitable learning environments built on those strengths, research into curriculum, pedagogy, cognition, memory and perhaps even into whether sustained learning can help slow cognitive decline and neurodegenerative processes will be carried out. In this case, the goal is not about employment but about relevance, connection and having a continued intellectual life.
A Living Laboratory
The centre plans to work with schools, colleges, universities and edtech companies, while building collaborations with international experts in learning sciences and educational technology. “The idea is to create a robust learning sciences ecosystem with the help of all these partners,” says Prof. Varma, continuing, “Within IIIT-H itself, we will be working very closely with the Division of Flexible Learning and MSIT (a multi-university interdisciplinary post-graduate programme) to experiment with new methods of learning, so in that sense, the center is going to be a living lab”.
The centre will begin with two full-time founding faculty members that include Prof. Varma and Prof. Garimella, alongside affiliate faculty from other IIIT-H centers. Over the next three to four years, the plan is to grow the core faculty to between five and ten members, while expanding through projects and collaborations. The initial emphasis is likely to fall particularly on higher education and third-age learning, even as work with schools gathers momentum.
The future of learning
There is no doubt that AI is here and it is here to stay. So rather than asking what AI will do to education, the center aims to ask what education ought to be like in the wake of AI. This is a much harder question. It requires moving beyond tools and platforms and thinking about cognition, motivation, memory, and experiences. CETLS does not aim to build the next generation of educational technology but to understand what it means to learn in a world where intelligent machines are already part of the classroom, or the workplace or everyday life. “Our goal is to understand the impact of AI in learning and education for the short term, medium term, and long term. This is a very important and appropriate concern for all of us, given that the use of AI is in everything – be it in research, ideation, education, report creation, or even mathematical proofs of long-standing mathematical problems,” states Prof. Sandeep Shukla. “It boils down to this thought – when machines can provide us with answers, how can we make sure humans still know how to think?”, sums up Prof. Varma.
Sarita Chebbi is a compulsive early riser. Devourer of all news. Kettlebell enthusiast. Nit-picker of the written word especially when it’s not her own.