Teaching Method for Non-technical Adult Learners to Gain an Authentic Understanding of AI within a Day

Abstract

This study proposes and evaluates an effective teaching method for non-technical adults who want to gain an authentic understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) within a short time budget. Recent studies have revealed the existence of non-technical business professionals who want to improve their participation in technical discussions and identified their needs for learning technologies effectively using real programming tools. The proposed teaching method utilizes the story aligned with the history of AI, visual feedback, and agile practices to overcome the challenges the non-technical adults face. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed teaching method by the open coding method and by the paired t-test over the responses to the questions based on the expectancy-value theory before and after the lecture. We found that this teaching method effectively supported the learners to understand the core technical concepts of AI using authentic tools within a day. We also confirmed that the non-technical adult learners had significantly changed their attitude from initially negative to positive in terms of expected success and value in understanding AI, which is one of the essential outcomes for the learners as they predict the learner’s performance on understanding AI in the future.