“The Learning Revolution: How AI Bridged Bangladesh’s Education Gap”

Farzana Zahid Manoshi :

Just a few years ago in Bangladesh, the word digitalization was depicted through the visualization of multimedia projectors, students reviewing learning resources through digital devices instead of paper and pen in classrooms, and bookish materials being contained in e-resources.

But the perception completely shifted after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 in Bangladesh. The blooming of artificial intelligence in education paved the way to a new milestone and introduced a new dimension in digitalization.

Before the AI revolution, I still remember the struggles of preparing any kind of assignment or task through searching in web engines for hours, looking through pages after pages, and still the need didn’t seem to meet the mark.

The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought dynamic upswings in the whole education system in Bangladesh.

Every query and every interrogation now has the perfect response. You can now just go into the chatbot, ask anything, and get an answer along with all the logic, facts, data, and references. It nowadays feels like having a genie in hand. Now at this stage, the changes due to AI evolution feel so transformative.

With the expansion of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, learning has become adaptive. Even for our slightest doubt, we are running to AI.

From our classrooms to our study desks nowadays, AI is irreplaceable. We can turn a blind eye to a textbook, but not to ChatGPT. Most of the students are now turning to AI, prioritizing it as a central medium. AI has also been a helping hand for teachers.

The most frequent question is what has led to this paradigm shift in learning, breaking the habitual and traditional patterns of academic practice, especially in less than two years. Nobody ever predicted that the learning culture would be stimulated into AI dependency, whether it’s turning completely to it for knowledge acquisition or concurrent reliance.

As a student, I truly express thankfulness to AI for being the perfect mentor, but there is also another side of the coin we can’t be ignorant of. Is this reliance becoming a pitfall in the disguise of a blessing? It is crystal clear that the more AI absorption is happening, the more our critical thinking is diminishing.

According to the “Your Brain on ChatGPT” project at MIT Media Lab, neural connectivity has dropped by 34-48% among AI users compared to non-users in academic settings. Frequent use of it is making us lazy. Now we think less and rely more.

In Bangladesh, the situation is no different than the global AI trend. In academics, literature, research, and STEM, all sectors of Bangladesh are suffering from generative AI plagiarism. Originality and integrity in ideas or work has become a rare practice nowadays.

But even with these few drawbacks, we can’t deny the truth of how AI has made our academic and work life the easiest ever. According to StatCounter GlobalStats, ChatGPT dominates AI chatbot usage in Bangladesh, accounting for over 80 percent of total traffic, far surpassing alternatives such as Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

Survey data published on Mendeley Data from Bangladeshi universities indicates widespread academic use of generative AI tools, with student adoption rising from around 5 percent in 2022 to nearly 49 percent by 2025. However, reports from DigiBanglaTech note that national internet penetration remains at approximately 50 percent, highlighting structural barriers to equitable AI-driven learning across the country.

According to psychologist and social scientist Howard Gardner, “By about 2050, every child would need a few years of schooling in the Three R’s: Reading, ‘riting, rithmetic, and a little bit of coding.” After that, “Teachers who functioned more as coaches would expose students to activities that would challenge their thinking, expose them to ideas, and guide them toward professions that excite them.” Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education, added, “I don’t think going to school for 10 or 15 years as we’ve done makes sense.”

The rapid growth of AI in Bangladesh can be summed up as embracing a tech visionary wave where the education sector is synchronizing at an ideal frequency. Even years ago, Bangladesh was lagging behind in global tech compatibility, but due to AI’s uniform access to standardized knowledge worldwide; the resource gap has been bridged. Quality is now at our doorstep.

So the spotlight should be on the expansion of AI utilization from urban to rural areas in Bangladesh. The more we blend our own insights and AI together, the more advantages can be multiplied. To make our country highly accomplished in innovation and literacy, there is no substitute for artificial intelligence.

(The writer is a student Semester: 4.2, Department: Cse
Ahsanullah University of Science And Technology)