Wayne Holmes

University College London / UNESCO / IRCAI / Council of Europe

The need for AI regulation is true in particular in the fields of education. Education is a special case and different from other sectors. Therefore, it reuqires careful considerations: How can we develop and implement legal and organisational requirements for ethical AI introduction and usage? How can we safeguard and maybe even strengthen human r...

This paper presents a systematic review of the scientific literature on trustworthy and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Education (AI&ED), including both AI applied in education to support teaching and learning (AIED), as well as education about AI (AI literacy). Key interest is the identification of global trends with a special focus on u...

The transition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a lab-based science to live human contexts brings into sharp focus many historic, socio-cultural biases, inequalities, and moral dilemmas. Many questions that have been raised regarding the broader ethics of AI are also relevant for AI in Education (AIED). AIED raises further specific challenges r...

By using standardised approaches, systematic reviews of the educational, scientific literature can inform educational research and influence educational policies and practices. However, the various systematic reviews of the scientific literature in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and education all adopt individual approaches, making it ch...

How can we develop and implement legal and organisational requirements for ethical AI introduction and usage? How can we safeguard and maybe even strengthen human rights, democracy, digital equity and rules of law through AI-supported education and learning opportunities? And how can we involve all educational levels (micro, meso, macro) and stakeh...

At AIED 2022 (Durham), a panel discussion took place in response to a provocation that acknowledged that the work of the AIED community is increasingly being commercialised and that, partly as a consequence, AIED is increasingly being criticised (e.g., for perpetuating poor pedagogic practices, datafication, and introducing classroom surveillance)....

Increasingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having an impact on distance-based higher education, where it is revealing multiple ethical issues. However, to date, there has been limited research addressing the perspectives of key stakeholders about these developments. The study presented in this paper sought to address this gap by investigating th...

Administrative processes are ubiquitous in modern life and have been identified as a particular burden to those with accessibility needs. Students who have accessibility needs often have to understand guidance, fill in complex forms, and communicate with multiple parties to disclose disabilities and access appropriate support. Conversational user i...

This is the Arabic version of UNESCO Guidelines for ICT in Education Policies and Masterplans. This publication affirms the human vision to the review of the implications of emerging technologies for education. It adopts the humanistic vision to guide policy-makers to ensure that when adopting technology, human rights and human dignity should be...

The datafication of learning has created vast amounts of digital data which may contribute to enhancing teaching and learning. While researchers have successfully used learning analytics, for instance, to improve student retention and learning design, the topic of privacy in learning analytics from students' perspectives requires further investigat...

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have generated great expectations for the future impact of AI in education and learning (AIED). Often these expectations have been based on misunderstanding current technical possibilities, lack of knowledge about state-of-the-art AI in education, and exceedingly narrow views on the functions of e...

This is the Russian version of UNESCO book AI and Education: Guidance for Policy-makers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevita...

It is well understood that affect interacts with and influences the learning process [2, 7, 9].

The ‘International Forum on AI and Education: Ensuring AI as a Common Good to Transform Education’ was co-organized by UNESCO and China on 7 and 8 December 2021. The forum is set out to explore the importance and role of digital humanism in AI and education.

La inteligencia artif icial (IA) tiene la capacidad de hacer frente a algunos de los mayores desafíos que afronta, hoy en día, el ámbito de la educación, de desarrollar prácticas de ensenanza y aprendizaje innovadoras y, finalmente, de acelerar el progreso en la consecución del Objetivo de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) 4. No obstante, estos avances t...

L’intelligence artificielle (IA) a tout le potentiel pour relever certains des plus grands défis liés a l’éducation du XXIe siecle, pour innover dans les pratiques d’enseignement et d’apprentissage et, en derniere instance, pour accélérer les progres vers l’ODD 4. Cependant, et de maniere inévitable, ces développements technologiques rapides entraî...

The third International Forum on Artificial Intelligence and Education, held in 2021, explored the theme ‘Ensuring AI as aCommon Good to Transform Education’. This publication is a synthesis of the key discussions, focusing on the role in AI and education of digital humanism, and on how AI governance and AI innovation networks can be enhanced to di...

This is the Korean version of UNESCO book AI and Education: Guidance for Policy-makers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevitab...

Educational technologies in mathematics typically focus on fostering either procedural knowledge by means of structured tasks or, less often, conceptual knowledge by means of exploratory tasks. However, both types of knowledge are needed for complete domain knowledge that persists over time and supports subsequent learning. We investigated in two q...

Today, for citizens to engage confidently, critically and safely with new and emerging technologies, including systems driven by artificial intelligence (AI), they need to acquire a basic understanding of such tools and technologies (DEAP2). Greater awareness will also lead to improved sensibility towards potential issues related to data protection...

The publication aims to guide policy-makers to ensure that when adopting technology, human rights should be defended; inclusion, equity and gender equality should be at the heart of solutions; and innovations should be considered as a common good. Based on these principles, the publication presents a human-centred view on the potentials of technolo...

This paper presents the key conclusions to the forthcoming edited book on The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Education: Practices, Challenges and Debates (August 2022, Routlege). As well as highlighting the key contributions to the book, it discusses the key questions and the grand challenges for the field of AI in Education (AIED)in the cont...

Comparing universities and courses is of interest to a variety of stakeholders including potential students, policy makers, news and media organisations, ranking providers, and universities themselves. There are a range of existing university ranking schemes that provide comparisons (e.g. Academic Ranking of World Universities) but typically these...

Research on student perspectives of learning analytics suggests that students are generally unaware of the collection and use of their data by their learning institutions, and they are often not involved in decisions about whether and how their data are used. To determine the influence of risks and benefits awareness on students’ data use preferenc...

Risks and opportunities are provided regarding the development of digital learning in Asia and Europe. Insights are offered on how to ensure such development fosters inclusive learning and teaching strategies that benefit all education stakeholders. I contributed parts relating digital education development to student government, student representa...

This is the Arabic version of UNESCO book AI and Education: Guidance for Policy-makers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevitab...

This is the Chinese version of UNESCO book AI and Education: Guidance for Policy-makers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevita...

While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and in...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is envisioned as a new tool to accelerate the progress towards the achievement of SDG 4. Policies and strategies for using AI in education are central to maximizing AI’s benefits and mitigating its potential risks. Fostering AI-ready policy-makers is the starting point of the policy development process. This publication...

Mobile Learning Week (MLW) is the United Nations’ flagship event on digital technologies in education, which has been organized by UNESCO and its partners for eight consecutive years. An online edition of Mobile Learning Week was held for the first time ever. Devoted to the theme of ‘Beyond Disruption: Technology Enabled Learning Futures’, the 2020...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevitably bring multiple risks and challenges, which have so far outpaced policy debates and reg...

In this paper, we describe accessible design considerations for the Assistants for the Disclosure and Management of Information about Needs and Support project (ADMINS). In ADMINS, artificial intelligence (AI) services are being used to create a virtual assistant (VA), which is being designed to enable students to disclose any disabilities, and to...

Evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that learning counterintuitive concepts in mathematics and science requires inhibitory control (IC). This prevents interference from misleading perceptual cues and naïve theories children have built from their experiences of the world. Here, we (1) investigate associations between IC, counterintuitive r...

The AIT project started in 2019 and aims to identify and analyse AI best practices in HE in three countries to develop a road map for future developments and use of AI. The AIT project will investigate three dimensions of AI in education: learning ‘for’ AI, learning ‘about’ AI, learning ‘with’ AI. The focus will be on identifying examples and best...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been researched in educational contexts for more than 30 years (Woolf 1988; Cumming and McDougall 2000; du Boulay 2016). More recently, commercial AI products have also entered the classroom. However, while many assume that Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) means students taught by robot teac...

Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is...

This chapter reviews the field broadly referred to as Intelligent Learning Environments (ILE), capturing the state-of-the-art in both Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). After a brief historical account, we report design architectures and implementation approaches exemplified by a recent example. We t...

Algorithms, drawn from Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies , are increasingly being used in distance education. However, currently little is known about the attitudes of distance education students to the benefits and risks associated with AI. For example, is AI broadly welcomed by distance education students, thought to be irrelevant, or dis...

There has been a growing interest in how teaching might be informed by learning design (LD), with a promising method for investigating LD being offered by the emerging field of learning analytics (LA). In this study, we used a novel LA for LD methodology to investigate the implementation of LD in an online distance learning context. A key innovatio...

The Learning Innovation team at the Open University, the UK’s largest higher education institution, is leading a project to support the design and implementation of educational Virtual Reality (VR). Using an iterative design methodology enables the team to explore VR’s educational affordances, and the new opportunities these represent to educators...

As part of the large-scale implementation of Learning Design at The Open University, the UK’s largest higher education institution, a taxonomy of learning activities informs the development of course modules. The taxonomy is also used to map a module’s Learning Design, to categorize its learning activities, after it has been developed. This enables...

Feedback in exploratory learning systems has been depicted as an important contributor to encourage exploration. However, few studies have explored learners’ interaction patterns associated with feedback and the use of external representations in exploratory learning environments. This study used Fractions Lab, an exploratory learning environment f...

University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the driving technological force of the first half of this century, and will transform virtually every industry, if not human endeavors at large. Businesses and governments worldwide are pouring enormous sums of money into a very wide array of implementations, and dozens of start-ups are being funded to the t...

Pattern-finding analytical techniques to improve our understanding of the use of feedback and scaffolding during problem-solving processes have attracted much attention. This study used a lag sequential analysis to unfold the learning patterns according to affective states during student problem-solving processes. The results have shown that the si...

2019’s Mobile Learning Week (MLW), UNESCO’s flagship event for information and communication technology (ICT) in education, focused on the theme ‘Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development’. Held over five days in Paris, it comprised a sequence of high-profile events (a global conference, a policy forum and workshops, a symposium and strat...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the ways in which we experience everyday tasks, and its reach is extending into education. Promises of AI-driven personalised learning, learner agency, adaptive teaching and changes to teacher roles are increasingly becoming realistic but the ethical considerations surrounding these, and even simpler innovat...

Diversity has long been the norm in German schools. The educational system, however, has not yet succeeded in providing all students with equal educational opportunities: In Germany, more than in almost any other country, learning success is dependent on a student’s social background. Consequently, the call for personalisation of the learning exper...

It has been suggested that the amount of plagiarism and cheating in high-stakes assessment has increased with the introduction of e-assessments (QAA 2016), which means that authenticating student identity and authorship is increasingly important for online distance higher education. This study focuses on the implementation and use in the UK of an a...

Der vorliegende Report zeigt auf, dass digitale Medien ein großes Potenzial bergen, wenn es darum geht, personalisiertes Lernen effektiv umzusetzen. Allerdings steht die Prüfung noch aus, ob dies auch in der Praxis gelingt. Selbst in Ländern, die zu den Vorreitern gehören, gibt es kaum belastbare Evaluationsstudien. Die wichtige Frage, ob digitale...

Trust is a fundamental prerequisite for the success of any technological development, especially in education. Without the trust of stakeholders, educational technologies (however effective they might be) can fail to be taken up at scale. This work-in-progress paper reports on a study that investigated the trust students have in tools developed to...

In a bid to better understand cultural differences and feed into the design of an exploratory learning environment for learning fractions in China, we conducted a study in three schools in Beijing. A mixed methods protocol was followed involving 186 children. In this paper, we report several results, including a paired t-test suggesting a statistic...

In a bid to better understand cultural differences and feed into the design of an exploratory learning environment for learning fractions in China, we conducted a study in three schools in Beijing. A mixed methods protocol was followed involving 186 children. In this paper, we report several results, including a paired t-test suggesting a statistic...

Authenticating the students’ identity and authenticity of their work is increasingly important to reduce academic malpractices and for quality assurance purposes in Education. There is a growing body of research about technological innovations to combat cheating and plagiarism. However, the literature is very limited on the impact of e‐authenticati...

We observe achievement gaps even in rich western countries, such as the UK, which in principle have the resources as well as the social and technical infrastructure to provide a better deal for all learners. The reasons for such gaps are complex and include the social and material poverty of some learners with their resulting other deficits, as wel...

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the...

Taking a process-orientated, social constructivist lens, we examine the case of a digital game called Words Matter. The game was designed for children with dyslexia and was informed by principles from casual games and evidence-based practice from special education. Focusing on the game play of two groups of children, we employ a systematic thematic...

This paper describes how graph-based modelling can be used to explore interactions associated with a change in students' affective state when they are working with an exploratory learning environment (ELE). We report on a user study with an ELE that is able to detect students' affective states from their interactions and speech. The data collected...

There is an increased recognition that learning design drives both student learning experience and quality enhancements of teaching and learning. The Open University UK (OU) has been one of few institutions that have explicitly and systematically captured the designs for learning at a large scale. By applying advanced analytical techniques on large...

In this presentation, we will discuss a pilot study (carried out at seven universities across Europe including the Open University and involving more than 300 students) which investigated a prototype online assessment authentication system currently in development by the EU-funded TeSLA project (http://tesla-project.eu, EU H2020 Grant Agreement: 68...

Nesta is a global innovation foundation. Our mission is to spark and grow new ideas to improve how the world works for everyone. We use our knowledge, networks, funding and skills to take on big challenges, working in partnership with others to make change happen. We are a UK charity and our work is enabled by a financial endowment. Nesta is a regi...

This report argues that the ability to solve problems with others is a crucial skill for our young people in the workplace of the future but the current education system does little to support it. Key findings Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) is an increasingly important skill to teach young people in order to prepare them for the future. Despit...

The paper is available at http://rdcu.be/GqPq This paper describes the design and ecologically valid evaluation of a learner model that lies at the heart of an intelligent learning environment called iTalk2Learn. A core objective of the learner model is to adapt formative feedback based on students' affective states. Types of adaptation include w...

Research in the learning sciences and mathematics education has suggested that ‘thinking aloud’ (verbalization) can be important for learning. In a technology-mediated learning environment, speech might also help to promote learning by enabling the system to infer the students’ cognitive and affective state so that they can be provided a sequence o...

Robust domain knowledge consists of conceptual and procedural knowledge. The two types of knowledge develop together, but are fostered by different learning tasks. Exploratory tasks enable students to manipulate representations and discover the underlying concepts. Structured tasks let students practice problem-solving procedures step-by-step. Educ...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an affect-aware intelligent support component that is part of a learning environment known as iTalk2Learn. The intelligent support component is able to tailor feedback according to a student's affective state, which is deduced both from speech and interaction. The affect prediction is used to d...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an affect-aware intelligent support component that is part of a learning environment known as iTalk2Learn. The intelligent support component is able to tailor feedback according to a student's affective state, which is deduced both from speech and interaction. The affect prediction is used to d...