Artificial Intelligence in Education as Lifelong Learning: What Should be Learnt?

Abstract

The rapid development of tools and techniques in the field of Generative AI (GenAI) has affected many sectors. One of these sectors is definitely education, where teaching, learning, assessment, curricula and policy document need to be revised and updated. Many research studies also highlight the necessity for teacher professional development regarding Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), as AIED is also a field under constant development and will need continuous upskilling during the coming years. There are now teacher training courses in fundamental AIED available, and more are under development. There seems to be a consensus regarding what an introduction course in AIED should comprise, but not regarding which topics continuation courses should follow-up related to continuous lifelong learning. With the heutagogical idea of asking the learners about what to learn, this question was posted to participants in a course on fundamental AIED. In a discussion forum, course participants gave their suggestions and commented on other course participants' postings. Moreover, the forum postings were supplemented with suggestions and comments from email conversations between the authors and course participants. According to the concept of Open Coding, forum postings and email conversations were analysed and divided into the categories of: AI didactics, GenAI tools for teaching, Prompt engineering, Audio generation and Voice cloning, Customisation of AI models, AI and disinformation, Applicable takeaways and AI sustainability and ethics. All of the categories were found to be relevant in a second Axial coding reanalysis. The category Applicable takeaways was found to be the axial category that ties all of the categories together for a meaningful course design. The conclusion is that a continuation course, as in introductory courses on AIED, must contain both theoretical parts with themes such as AI sustainability and ethics, but also concrete applications such as AI didactics to fulfil the aim of Applicable takeaways. Finally, it could be difficult to involve all the categories in just one or two continuation courses. However, as mentioned earlier, AIED should to be seen as continuous lifelong learning.