AI Grand Challenges for Education

TLDR

The article outlines five long‑term educational challenges: providing mentors for every learner, fostering 21st‑century skills, leveraging interaction data, ensuring universal access to global classrooms, and supporting lifelong and lifewide learning. The purpose is to explore how AI can contribute to achieving these long‑term educational goals. The authors propose a vision and research agenda that includes AI‑enabled instructional systems and personalized learning to develop and share global educational resources and analyze large instructional datasets.

Abstract

This article focuses on contributions that AI can make to address long‐term educational goals. Challenges are described that support: (1) mentors for every learner; (2) learning 21st century skills; (3) interaction data for learning; (4) universal access to global classrooms; and (5) lifelong and lifewide learning. A vision and brief research agenda are described for each challenge along with goals that lead to development of global educational resources and the reuse and sharing of digital educational resources. Instructional systems with AI technology are described that currently support richer experiences for learners and supply researchers with new opportunities to analyze vast data sets of instructional behavior from big databases that record elements of learning, affect, motivation, and social interaction. Personalized learning is described that facilitates student and group experience, reflection, and assessment.