The past few years have seen various examples of the fully-automated classroom be put into operation, prompting equal amounts of consternation and celebration. One such Arizona charter school opening in 2025 is described as using AI-driven platforms to give students short bursts of personalised ‘core instruction’. This school – ‘Unbound Academy’ – will be fully-online and targeted at fourth to eighth graders. The founders sold the idea that AI efficiencies could cut daily tuition times down to only two hours a day with students “engag[ing] in short, focused bursts of learning across different subjects” (Sawyers 2024). While the school will employ some human ‘Guides’ to help point students toward the right learning resources, it is claimed that AI can take care of the rest, with webcams gaging engagement and emotions to set the best level of challenge for each student. Having completed their academics in two hours, the remainder of the students’ day can be devoted to online sessions devoted to ‘life-skills’ such as critical thinking, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. 

It is probably best not to bet on this vision of school taking hold anytime soon. These sorts of disruptive forays into schooling rarely end up proving sustainable and/or profitable over more than a few years. The history of ed-tech is littered with high-profile edge cases like Unbound that purport to show alternate models of how schooling should be. A decade earlier, the heavily-financed ‘Alt-School’ chain of schools was making similar promises about demonstrating the future data-driven schooling, until it abruptly closed its schools and pivoted to being an edtech software company.

Nevertheless, these sorts of disruptive forays do solidify the idea in the minds of investors and innovators that AI is capable of doing away with traditional schooling altogether – thus attracting further rounds of hype and finance into the AIED project. As such, projects such as Unbound Academy are more symbolic than a serious roadmap to what all schooling will look like in the future. More likely, is that we might well be seeing clunky AI platforms  soon being inserted into the timetables of impoverished mainstream schools around the world for a burst of automated instruction. Unbound’s ‘2 hour learning’ model offers a quick fix that will understandably appeal to time-poor school administrators desperate to make efficiencies and find ways of patching up their ailing public school provision. Whether this should be seen as cause for celebration or consternation is clearly open to debate.

Reference

Sawyers, P. (2024).  Arizona’s getting an online charter school taught entirely by AI. TechCrunch, 20th December, https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/20/arizonas-getting-an-online-charter-sc…