AI and E-Learning - Where are we heading and what are the implications for international development?

Short talk on AI and e-learning, with a further focus on the considerations for using AI in international development work, and specificially for the German development cooperation.

Transcript

1. Techtalk: AI and E-Learning - Where are we heading and what are the implications for our work? adj. Prof. Dr. Dominic Orr, GIZ atingi & University of Nova Gorica 20.7.2023
2. Note: • We are not talking about atingi today • But we are talking about the environment in which atingi is active
3. Agenda The good: How can AI helps us achieve educational goals? The bad: What might be the negative implications of harnessing AI for learning? The ugly: What might be considerations from a German DC perspective?
4. The good: How can AI help us achieve educational goals?
5. Learning
6. Not personalized learning – but discovery around content • Navigation refers to the user's ability to move through the product or platform in a structured and intuitive manner. It focuses on providing clear pathways and controls for users to reach specific destinations or perform desired actions. Effective navigation ensures that users can easily find and access the features, content, or functionalities they need. Discovery focuses on helping users explore and find new content, features, or functionalities that they may not be aware of or actively seeking. It aims to provide serendipitous experiences and encourage user engagement by exposing them to relevant and interesting options they might otherwise miss. Recommendations; Trending or Popular Content; Related Content; Randomized Experiences
7. A rather special atingi course (not released) • Perhaps learning becomes infinite and doesn’t need course structures anymore? • https://online.atingi.org/mod/page/vi ew.php?id=94257
8. New forms of learning "Imagine how much more natural it would be to teach metacognitive skills, information literacy, and related topics when a learner’s primary activity is asking questions of an LLM, rather than reading a static text. Learning to ask useful questions – whether of an LLM, another person, or the universe itself – is directly at the center of the educational enterprise." David Wiley, Blogpost 2023 - https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/7238
9. The new importance of media literacy • You now receive what looks like the “perfect response” • You can also ask AI to synthesis and summarise for you (previously seen by the Bloom taxonomy as high level skills) • But now, it is even more important to critically evaluate the result “Another force attacking the Open Web is that of elegant consumption. Well-designed interfaces that delight and surprise us… … but when when there is no way to ‘view source’, then we become trapped as mere consumers (…).” https://mozilla.github.io/webmaker-whitepaper/#the- problem 2012
10. Creating
11. LLMs Will Make Creating Content Significantly Easier, Faster, and Cheaper LLMs will dramatically increase the speed of creating the informational resources that comprise the content infrastructure. The drafts of these informational resources will need to be reviewed and improvements will need to be made – just as is the case with all first drafts – to ensure accuracy and timeliness. But it appears that LLMs can get us 80% or so of the way to reasonable first drafts orders of magnitude faster, eliminating the majority of the expense involved in this part of the process. David Wiley, Blogpost 2023 - https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/7129
12. Creation of simple course with a co-pilot
13. Creation of simple course with a co-pilot
14. There are so many tools. Use compilations for reference https://zenodo.org/record/8072950
15. But you don’t have to read it yourself! Use a tool for that too… Quivr is an open source tool for building second brains and personal assistants. It is a tool for thinking, learning and creating. (Based on functionalities from ChatGPT)
16. The bad: What might be the negative implications of harnessing AI?
17. AI-generated courses and learning pathways lead to poor pedagogy "Even if the dystopian scenario of replacing teachers with AI is avoided, learners’ agency might be undermined by more use of adaptive AI in education. This means less time for learners to interact with each other, more decisions made by machines, and more focus on the type of knowledge that is easiest to automate." AI and education - Guidance for policy-makers, UNESCO 2021, p.27
18. AI-based AI- content recognition erroneous
19. The ugly: What might be considerations from a German DC perspective?
20. AI as extraction! A “smokescreen”? “Artificial intelligence (AI) finally seems to be living up to the hype. We can chat with it, ask it to write an essay or use it to generate a photo-realistic image of anything we can imagine. .. The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence is, however, a spectacle. It acts as a smokescreen that diverts our attention from both the far-reaching impacts of actual AI, as it exists today, and the disturbing politics it incubates. Grasping the sociological import of AI means engaging with what’s going on under the hood … it originates within the social matrix we already inhabit.” McQuillan, D. (2023). Predicted benefits, proven harms How AI’s algorithmic violence emerged from our own social matrix. The Sociological Review Magazine, 2023(June). https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.ekpj9730
21. In the “digital mine”
22. Not creating, but extracting value from others “In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to- person conversations.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/tech nology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html
23. Summary review (work in progress) • Scaling SDG 4. Education is provided in a way that it is difficult to scale, especially in the context of increasing youth populations and the need for lifelong learning provisions. • User-centred learning. AI has great potential to provide customised learning in new ways. • Quality learning provision. AI has great potential to act as an assistive technology for creators of new learning pathways. • Dynamic. The dynamism in the field presents opportunities and the chance for us to influence future developments • One-size fits all. AI could lead to increasingly standardised forms of learning consumption. • Inclusion. AI has significant risks for international cooperation and development as they may promote extractive tendencies on the labour market (through the backdoor). • Public goods. (Until now) AI models have been driven by commercial perspectives and often offered in rent-based business models. • Green and digital. The computing power needed to drive AI services are a risk to the climate. • Competition not collaboration. AI LLL models do not promote sharing and collaborative development and are often biased to their original context (e.g. English lang.)
24. Other resources • https://youtu.be/wtHrbKK_avM • https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ