By
Richard Sweeney sweeney@njit.edu;
and Frank Daly frank@bookinfo.org
Accelerated learning is the continuously increasing acquisition and use of new knowledge with little or no loss of understanding. The significant competitive advantage for colleges and universities goes to those individuals and institutions that have succeeded in accelerating learning. There is no evidence that college and university administrators have learned from the cognitive scientists. Current learning technologies are not capable of making any useful inferences to help the learner, only the inferences programmed by the teacher/designer. The future is the marriage of current learning technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate learning. The most significant use of AI and learning platforms is whether they can solve learning problems and improve learning processes that the learner, teacher, tutor or programmer did not anticipate. AI can amplify highly interactive, motivating, learning environments, enabling students to continuously improve their critical thinking skills. It is certainly true that AI will not be able to replace the teacher for the near-term future and, perhaps never. However, AI can effectively amplify the capability of the tutor, teacher and mentor and therefore accelerate the learning of students. In order to achieve accelerated learning and remain competitive, colleges and universities must invest, research, and develop learning platforms that integrate artificial intelligence with the research findings of cognitive scientists.