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Project Consortium

Our consortium is built upon a longstanding mutual research partnership among the European (Estonia, Sweden, Cyprus and The Netherlands) and South Korean consortium members into a higher education partnership that combines our research interest and expertise with Master level education.

• Focus on educational innovation via effective, competent and critical reflective use of AI solutions includes a focus on sustainable value creation that is practical, ethical, inclusive, and equitable, and alert to issues that arise in the conjoining of human and machine effort in educating both people artificially intelligent (learning) systems and knowledge development in the teaching and learning environment. In this way, it is capitalizing on the added value that AI can contribute to pursuing greater individual and collective well-being, while also alerting students to human (individual, social, and cultural) issues and challenges that arise with the expanding role of AI solutions in education, we expect to make a strong contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 4,: Quality Education.

Seven higher education institutions from South Korea, Sweden, Estonia, Cyprus and the Netherlands join forces, with a view of setting up the ‘AITE’ programme. The joint higher education institutions bring together expertise needed to deliver the programme, combining knowledge of AI solutions in the field of teaching and educational research.

Estonia
TALLINN UNIVERSITY

Sweden
UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

Cyprus
UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS

The Netherlands
NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences

South Korea
SUNCHON NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
KONJU NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
CHUNG-ANG UNIVERSITY
 

AI and sustainability

As the guardian of societal progress and knowledge, education is one of the core indicators of Sustainable Development within the United Nation’s Agenda 21 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2001). The Sustainable Development Goal 4 “Quality Education'' emphasizes the educational inequality and calls for school enrolment rates at every level and inclusive quality education for all, including vulnerable children, children with disabilities or other special needs, migrant and displaced children, indigenous children, and deprived children in rural areas (United Nations, 2015). Education is a basic human right and the foundation to drive sustainable development. AI-enabled education can provide more possibilities to accomplish sustainable development, which strives for quality education for all.

There are some challenges in using AI in education. One challenge is to prepare teachers for an AI-powered education (Celik et al., 2022; UNESCO, 2019). Teachers must have core competencies to use AI in a pedagogical and meaningful way. The roles and competencies of teachers are critical factors to provide quality education. Another challenge is to ensure the quality of data and to deal with ethics in data collection, use and dissemination (Diebold & Han, 2022; UNESCO, 2019; European Commission, 2022) in education. The role that data and AI will play in teaching and learning is game-changing. By applying advanced learning analytics and extracting data-driven insights into student behaviors, needs, and skills, their learning potential can be further unlocked and the operational efficiency of the educational institutions enhanced. Yet at the same time the teaching programme will recognize that the development of AI, access to AI and the use of AI are not equitably distributed and will only contribute to sustainability goals if much better understanding is gained about new technologies inevitably bringing about negative and perhaps unintended outcomes alongside intended outcomes. In all, shaping a productive interaction between AI, education and sustainability will mean that future teachers acquire digital literacy in a critically reflexive and caring form that is alert to technologies’ role in shaping the great issues and disparities of our time, including also significant challenges to personal freedom.