New Delhi (India), November 3: Gone are the days when you would spend hours teaching by reading the text written in the books. In today's day and age, everyone is looking for a quick solution. Whether teaching or learning, people want effective and quick methods. And considering these demands, automatic summaries have been introduced.
Automatic summaries have made it easier for teachers and students. Now, you can focus more on learning than just reading the information. Automatic summaries have redefined conventional learning and teaching methods.
To look more into how it has redefined learning and teaching, read on because here we will discuss all the positives and negatives in detail.
What Is Automatic Summarization?
For those unfamiliar with automatic summarization, it condenses the original text and brings out a shorter version with all the important points without human help. There are many search engines like Google and online applications like Resoomer. They automatically summarize your text using AI, making it way quicker and less laborious than the manual methods to summarize the text.
So, if you are going for productive reading that will save time and give you the concept, automatic summarization is the best option. You can summarize your text by simply putting your whole document in a computer program or application, giving you the condensed version of your text within seconds.
Methods Of Automatic Summarization
There are two main methods of automatic summarization: extractive and abstraction.
Extractive Method
In the extractive method, important phrases and keywords of the whole text are picked out. It is the same as skimming, where you review the important facts and figures and basic headings and subheadings. It does not change any sentences from the original text.
Abstractive Method
On the other hand, in the abstractive method, a summary is written in which some new phrases and sentences are not in the original text but have the same meaning. It is closer to what a human might write like. It has natural language generation, which makes it easier to comprehend.
You can choose the automatic summarization method when you run the command to summarize your text.
How Do Automatic Summaries Redefine Learning And Teaching?
What would be your first thought when you open a document full of information and quite a long chapter? Reading it all is hard; the first thing you would want is to skim through it. But sometimes, we miss many important things when skimming. It would be best to summarize it, but manual summarization takes much time. We have one solution for all these problems: automatic summaries.
You put your text in an AI program, and it summarizes it into two to three paragraphs. You will get a brief idea of what it's about and only have to spend a little time reading it. Similarly, it will be easier for the teacher to read or explain each point separately, but now it has become briefer. It has redefined the learning and teaching methods in recent times. Now, one will question how. Read on to know how.
Saves time
When you search the web about any topic, there are huge volumes of material on a single topic. It takes hours, even days, to go through it all, and you only have a little time when studying. In such a situation, automatic summaries are of great help. You can have summaries of all the information on different web pages.
It saves so much time, and going through the summaries is a very productive reading technique when you have a lot of syllabi to cover. You can have all the points for all over the voluminous data, but at the same time, it will be concise for you to read without wasting any time.
2. Access To Information
Technologies or online applications for automatic summarization, like Resoomer, are making access to bulk information much easier for teachers and students. When there are long essays on a topic all over the web, a person going through the data will likely lose interest somewhere in the middle and may only go through it partially. Also, when you have to spend hours reading one article on a topic, it will not leave any more time to go through other information available.
But when you have an application to summarize all that bulk of information for you, you can read all of it, which ultimately makes access to information a lot easier for you.
3. Personalization Of Learning
Through AI, you can tailor the learning experience according to your needs. You can personalize it according to your pace, whether a fast or a slow learner. Moreover, the teachers can make it easier for each student. Usually, a personalized mode of learning when teaching a whole class of students is hard, but through automated summarization, you can save time and create a personalized experience for the students.
Many automatic summarization tools can be tailored according to the needs, which makes learning easier and more effective. You can enter your learning goals and the type of area you want to be focused more. Especially with the NLPs in AI, it can conversationally interact with you and make addressing your point easier.
4. Develops Digital Skills
Automated summarization tools, besides comprehensive learning, familiarize you with the newer technology. In this digital era, having an all-rounded knowledge of digital skills is necessary.
Once you learn how to use certain tools through AI, you can use them for many other purposes. It is effective in other modes of learning as well. Once the students are familiar with the basic use of technology and such digital skills, they can also use it in other domains of study. Considering the growth today, you will see that these basic digital skills and summarization techniques will also be very useful in other aspects of professional life.
5. Encourages Research
When students get to make their summaries through automated tools, they will see how easy and effective it is. It would barely take a few minutes for them to go through an entire bulk of information, which was too long to skim through. This will automatically encourage them to research themselves to find other better and easier ways to study through AI.
Most of the time, it encourages effective reading and self-study. Students become curious to learn more about a topic because it becomes easier to understand once it is summarized. The same is the case with teaching; as a teacher, you can spend the extra time you are left with researching other topics related to what you will be teaching.
6. Changes in The Role Of Teachers
Generally, there are some predefined roles of teachers in which teaching is the priority, and when we talk about teaching, it is the passage of information. The role of teachers is a lot more than that, but to be honest, teaching takes so much time and energy that other things are sometimes sidelined.
Fortunately, with automatic summaries, the teacher can easily prepare the study material, and teaching also takes little time. It leaves time and focus on the other roles of teachers, which are mentoring and facilitation in other studying domains. Even the students can have easy access and undivided attention from the teacher, ultimately redefining the teaching and learning experience.
7. Boost Concentration
You have a long essay written before you and must go through all the notes in one go. Could you read it all without losing track of thoughts or concentration? For most of the people, it is not possible.
But on the other hand, you can read a summarized text within a few minutes. You will read it, and every other line will boost concentration and keep you interested in reading more. This is how automatic summaries will not only boost concentration, but it will also make you understand better.
8. Productive Reading
Productive reading is reading less than you can but reading optimally and retaining what you have read. When you have so much irrelevant and repetitive information on one topic, you will most likely lose interest and will not remember even half of it.
But when reading or going through summarized text, you will know what you have read by the end of completing it because it is human nature that they retain things better when they are concise and to the point. So, a great advantage to learning is that automatic summaries help in productive reading and better retention of information.
Potential Disadvantages
We have talked in detail about how automatic summarization is so effective that we have said that it redefines teaching and learning, but it has its fair share of potential disadvantages. Some of those we have discussed here:
Too Much Dependence On Technology
At the initial stage, when students are developing their comprehension skills, and you introduce them to automatic methods and shortcuts, there is a risk that they may need to develop better comprehension skills. When given unhinged access to technology, students will not go for brainstorming and critical reading. It also makes them so dependent on technology that their comprehension and analytical skills are not used. So, it is better to let them use it in a balanced proportion.
Question Academic Integrity
The basic purpose of teaching and learning is to develop and hone your skills, and when a person is too dependent on automatic summaries, it might make other people question their academic integrity.
When you have a lengthy text and pick out important parts, though it might take time, your effort is spent on it. So it is better that, at least for once, you make your students do it independently so that they know how it works and no one can question their academic integrity.
Might Impact The Meaning Conveyed
Automatic summaries, though how reliable they are, sometimes the artificial intelligence needs help to comprehend the points that might be important to the writer and need to be included or understood when the text is summarized. This impacts the meaning conveyed, altering how the teacher or the student perceives the text.
Excessive use of any technological product can be damaging eventually. So it is advised to use it to your advantage but within certain limits so that the shortcomings do not overtake the advantages.
How Are Automatic Summaries Better Than Manual Summaries?
Some people also debate that manual summaries are better because humans know better which points are important in a text, and they highlight them. Another point is that when we summarize ourselves, we understand it better.
On the contrary, automatic summaries are better because no one has so much time to spare in this time and age. People want quick solutions, and with the least NLP technology in AI, the automatic summaries are as closest to human written style as they can be. They preserve the meaning of the original text, make it concise for us to understand better, and save time, all overshadowing its small shortcomings.
Conclusion
Research has proven that students who are taught by using automatic summaries in lecture videos learn better than those who don't have summaries in their lectures. This experiment was done on two groups of students, and their thorough results were recorded by their personal opinion surveys and their learning through assessments.
So this experiment and all the above-discussed points show how much automatic summaries affect the teaching and learning experience. When you summarize the text, it is easier to comprehend, effective in learning, and easy to access. It not only induces productive reading but also boosts concentration.
But considering all these factors, you have to consider the fact that there should be certain restraints considering the pedagogical and ethical implications of using AI. Too much use of automated tools can hamper the students' abilities, so it is advised to use them in a very balanced proportion to be beneficial and stay within certain academic restraints.
