Abstract:

In today's world of work, professionals are required to not only master the disciplinary competencies of their profession but also to master the technological competencies and skills that allow them to be more effective in their professional practice. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is presented as an emerging and accessible technology to make continuing education and different processes in the world of work more efficient. In response, higher education institutions must design instructional strategies that promote the development of these competencies by incorporating and encouraging the use of AI in the learning methodologies of continuing education programs, where learning experiences that will be continuously executed and implemented are promoted. They will become lifelong learners.

Statistics is one of the main subjects in most undergraduate academic programs. We believe that artificial intelligence combined with appropriately structured learning methodologies will facilitate students' interpretation and understanding of statistical concepts, thus achieving the development of technological competencies and skills applied to statistics, fundamental competencies and skills to solve or analyze random phenomena that are important outside the academic context. The growing use of AI by students suggests that they can research with AI the information necessary to solve problems on statistics topics and that they prefer its use to a class taught by the teacher. In this sense, the objective of this work is to know the perception of engineering students about the implementation of the use of artificial intelligence in class.

To achieve this, the class was asked to solve a Statistical Goodness of Fit problem, and another Statistical independence test problem, new topics for them, using AI as a source of information, then the teacher proceeded to teach these topics in the classroom in a traditional way so that students could compare the use of AI to obtain knowledge and solve problems with the class taught by a teacher. The opinions of 115 students were analyzed who compared obtaining statistical knowledge using AI with the traditional class taught by the teacher. To analyze the opinions, machine learning techniques were used, such as sentiment analysis; through a survey, the feelings of the 115 students about the use of AI as an educational intervention to investigate the course contents and solve statistical problems were obtained. The results show that students are not yet very familiar with the use of AI as part of learning methodologies, although the students' comments show some enthusiasm for the incorporation of this technology, they also show some uncertainty and distrust in acquiring the adequate knowledge of AI.

Keywords:

Educational Innovation, Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, Continuing Engineering Education, Lifelong Learning.