For the past year I’ve been lucky enough to teach applied AI to a variety of business students in France.

Teaching AI for people that have no background in math/statistics is more difficult that it might seem.

But it is by far the most interesting topic to tackle.

It involves such broad and numbers of aspects that are critical for future business leaders in terms of economic perspective of course but also ethically, and philosophically, that trying to get the essence of that subject and teach it was fascinating.

I suppose I learned more than my students and I decided to share what I found out.

I also survey 100 of them.

This article has a pedagogical objective and those lessons could actually be applied to any kind of topic and not specifically to AI.

1. Students need to understand why they should listen to what you say in the first place.

I had 10 different classes. The opportunity for me to A/B test my intro speech.

Guess what, when I started the course with the simplest explanation of why they needed to pay attention about this course, they were more involved. At least in the first 5 minutes. And the first 5 minutes determines the rest of your entire course.

You know what they say, you never get a second chance to make a first good impression. Well, it’s true.

For AI specifically the intro went like this :

• Who thinks he’s used AI today ? → Question that engages them right on time
• For those who haven’t used it, What is AI ? → Trying to take the temperature
• If i told you that if you used your phone, you probably used AI, what would you say ? → AI is everywhere, and they don’t know about it, it must be important…

Hooked.

#teaching #pedagogy #business-school #machine-learning #ai