Preface to ‘Adaptive Education: Harnessing AI for Academic Progress’

1. Workshop Overview

‘Adaptive Education: Harnessing AI for Academic Progress’ was an online workshop dedicated to exploring the innovative and transformative role of generative AI in education. The workshop was supported by a multidisciplinary organising committee, reflecting the wide-ranging impact that generative AI has had across the sector, as well as the multidisciplinary approaches to harnessing the benefits and addressing the challenges of employing generative AI in education. The workshop is one of two core components of a broader research project on the use of generative AI in higher education, funded by an International Science Partnerships Fund managed by the Northern Ireland Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The project aims to both understand the challenges and harness the opportunities which arise from the use of generative AI in education, and the workshop featured talks both on broader approaches for achieving this aim and on specific instances of harnessing AI for academic progress, with an emphasis on evidencing this progress.

The workshop included two invited talks and eight talks which were accepted based on peer-reviewed abstracts. Each abstract was reviewed by three members of the organizing committee, who additionally identified the highest-scoring submission for the abstract innovation award ‘Insights Gained from Using AI to Produce Cases for Problem-Based Learning’ [1]. The workshop was held online on 24 April 2024 and hosted by Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

2. Workshop Organizers and Reviewers

Dr. Muskaan Singh, Ulster University

Dr. Juliana Gerard, Ulster University

Dr. Usman Hadi, Ulster University

Dr. Morgan Macleod, Ulster University

Dr. Kelly Norwood, Ulster University

Antoine Rivoire, Ulster University

Dr. Jocelyn Dautel, Queen’s University Belfast

Dr. Zhiwei Lin, Queen’s University Belfast

Dr. Aisling Reid, Queen’s University Belfast

Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Dr. Caitlin Meyer, University of Amsterdam

Dr. Adina Camelia Bleotu, University of Bucharest

3. Workshop Talks

The workshop featured two invited talks on broader issues surrounding the use of AI in education, delivered by Sue Attewell, Head of AI and co-design at Jisc, and Andy Jaffrey, Head of the Office for Digital Learning and Chair of the AI working group at Ulster University. Both invited talks presented broader perspectives in the context of higher education. Attewell [2] discussed challenges and opportunities across the sector and key insights into students’ needs and concerns, highlighting the importance of an “embracing” approach to employing AI in education, rather than the less productive “outrunning” and “avoidance” approaches. Jaffrey [3] presented an institutional approach for supporting students and staff in the rapidly changing context of generative AI use in education, including key evidence which motivated important aspects of the approach.

This theme of evidence-based strategies was central to the broader aims of the workshop. In addition to the invited talks, the workshop included eight presentations selected via peer-reviewed abstracts. The workshop proceedings feature 6 of these talks, which involve two main approaches. The first of these featured evidence-based frameworks for embracing AI in higher education, including an institutional approach developed from a theoretical framework for best practices, presented by Mikroyannidis and colleagues [4], and a critical evaluation of the human tendency to anthropomorphize outputs from large language models by Reinecke and colleagues [5].

Next, the workshop showcased specific instances of harnessing AI for academic progress. Importantly, these instances involved not only (a) the development and implementation of a specific application of AI in a higher education context, but also (b) an assessment of the application’s impact on the education experience. This second element is key: with the rapid advancement of generative AI, a broad range of applications have been developed for academic contexts—both free and licensed; however, evidence of their effectiveness is often missing or anecdotal. By providing this evidence, the use cases featured in this workshop serve as important examples—both for identifying effective applications and for developing future ones.

The applications featured in this workshop include innovations across a module, like the use of AI by Abouzeid and Harris [1] to produce Problem-Based Learning cases, and the enhancement of digital marketing education by Bustard and Ghisoiu [6]. In addition, generative AI applications were featured which supported student coursework, e.g., coursework developed by Heffernan [7] with generated interview content for students to engage with and analyse. Finally, Garcia Vallejo demonstrated how generative AI could be utilized to enhance support for teachers, including increased AI literacy [8].

To conclude the workshop, the overarching themes raised throughout were collected and presented by workshop organizer Kelly Norwood, who led a discussion on these themes with the workshop participants. Similarly, we conclude these proceedings with a reflection on these themes, and a discussion of their implications for AI across higher education—both generally and across subject areas [9].

4. Conclusions

The papers presented at the workshop include general approaches to the challenges of embracing the use of AI in higher education, but they also feature various opportunities, particularly regarding the specific applications presented. The multidisciplinary approach taken in this workshop and in the broader project will be crucial for addressing these challenges and for harnessing opportunities going forward.