22/10/2019

"Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality." Yann LeCun Continuing the ITE Forum series, connecting industry and university worlds in discussion, October's theme focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning settings.

Continuing the ITE Forum series, connecting industry and university worlds in discussion, October's theme focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning settings.

The forum offered a veritable ‘smörgåsbord' of AI with expert contributions from: Dr. Patrick Camilleri (University of Malta) providing an overview of HE, AI and the age of digital ubiquity; followed by, Marco Neves (expert, working with the Portuguese Ministry of Education, DGE, developing a MOOC on AI for teachers) considering the impact on schools and the importance of preparing students to know and understand the challenges and opportunities of AI; Peter Claxton (Senior Strategic Manager, SMART Technologies) focused on the concept of hyper-personalisation, thinking about AI as way to support drive in educational outcomes; Dr Kamakshi Rajagopal (Independent Scholar) moved the discussion on to share important considerations behind the role of recommender systems within educational platforms and ways of increasing user engagement; with Vicky Charisi (Research Scientist, EC JRC, Seville) rounding off the session, sharing the results of her latest research into the impact AI/Robotics and Child's Learning with observational results showing that with the robot, the children tend to explain more to the robot about their own actions, both in terms of quantity and quality of discussion, developing their meta-cognitive skills.

Common strands linking each of the experts were: firstly, the need for educators to learn how we learn in this AI hybrid system, there is no competition, they can be complementary; secondly, that HE/schools need to equip students with the qualities to make decisions in this new age. In the final questions chaired by Dr Conor Galvin (University College Dublin) the conversation turned to the vital importance of ethics, to be supported by the forthcoming publication from UNICEF "Towards Global Guidance on AI and child rights" (Spring 2020)

Slides and recording of the session are published here. http://itelab.eun.org/ite-forum

Join the next discussion here on 12^th December on returns to innovative teaching – a focus on Virtual Reality.