Reimagining Online Learning: AI-Powered Personalization and Learner-Centered Design
A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102). This special issue belongs to the section "Technology Enhanced Education".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 October 2026 | Viewed by 266
Special Issue Editors
Interests: AI in education; online learning; learning analytics
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Online learning has shifted from a contingency measure to a core modality across educational systems. In parallel, rapid progress in generative AI, multimodal analytics, and intelligent agents is transforming what personalization can mean, moving beyond adaptive content sequencing toward real-time support that is sensitive to learners’ goals, attention, affect, and context. These developments offer promising directions for improving engagement, feedback quality, accessibility, and learning efficiency at scale. They also present urgent challenges for research and practice, including ensuring equity and privacy, preventing over-automation, strengthening assessment validity, and aligning AI-enabled interventions with sound pedagogy and learners’ agency.
Importantly, personalization is increasingly unfolding in immersive and embodied settings. VR/AR/MR learning environments, attention- and affect-aware systems, and multimodal agents introduce new design possibilities and new risks, raising questions about social presence, trust, transparency, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin human–AI collaborative learning.
This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances related to AI-powered personalization and learner-centered design in online, blended, and immersive learning environments. We consider contributions spanning theory, empirical studies, learning design, and implementation, with attention to how AI agent behavior can be aligned with instructional intent and ethically integrated into authentic learning contexts.
Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:
- AI-driven personalization and adaptive learning in online and immersive (VR/AR/MR) environments.
- Learner-centered instructional design, universal design for learning, and embodied pedagogies.
- Multimodal learning analytics and attention- or affect-aware feedback to support engagement and self-regulation.
- Generative AI and intelligent agents for tutoring, feedback, and assessment, including alignment with instructional intent.
- Social presence, trust, explainability, and transparency in AI-driven learning agents.
- AI-supported language learning, including immersive and embodied approaches.
- Neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human–AI collaborative learning.
- The equity, ethics, privacy, safety, and governance of AI-enabled personalization.
- Teacher roles, professional learning, and human–AI collaboration in design and facilitation.
Dr. Shen Ba
Dr. Shufan Yu
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- AI-powered personalization
- learner-centered design
- generative AI and intelligent agents
- multimodal learning analytics
- VR/AR/MR immersive learning
- attention and affect-aware feedback
- human–AI collaboration
- explainability and trust
- embodied language learning
- ethics, privacy, and governance
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