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By Benedict du Boulay, University of Sussex, UK, Antonija Mitrovic, University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Kalina Yacef, University of Sydney, Australia

The widespread arrival of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools has brought AI into the spotlight in many areas including education.  Governments are concerned about the immediate and long-term effects on employment and teachers are worried that their jobs may be at risk and that students will use such tools to cheat in assessments.  These fears have clouded the fact that AI has proved an effective classroom assistant for many years and that each progress in AI can translate into one for the field of education. 

The earliest AI system was Carbonnel’s Scholar[1] that could ask and answer questions about South American geography.  It used a symbolic AI knowledge base that could be swapped in or out for other topics, so in principle was quite versatile.  More recently, systems have been developed to directly assist teachers and educational administrators as well as learners.  These latter systems often depend on a different, non-symbolic branch of AI called machine learning to provide dashboards that exhibit patterns in data that can be exploited to good effect, such as helping teachers track student progress or administrators track students who might be in danger of dropping out.

The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence in Education covers the history of the use of AI in education, covering the issues outlined above.  Some chapters are technical and delve into the detail of these systems.  Others are theoretical looking at issues around human learning, metacognition and motivation.  Others again are more discursive and set AI in Education within its societal context, with a focus on ethics, on commercialisation and on the dangers datafication and the entry of Big Tech into education.  A final section looks at future issues including intelligent textbooks, virtual pedagogical agents and assessment.

[1] Scholar reference

Handbook of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Edited by Benedict du Boulay, University of Sussex, UK, Antonija Mitrovic, University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Kalina Yacef, University of Sydney, Australia is available now.

Read the introduction and sample chapter on Elgaronline