Human–AI Collaboration for Learning

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming education, with generative AI (GenAI), intelligent tutoring systems, conversational agents, and learning analytics becoming increasingly embedded in teaching and learning. Beyond using AI for content delivery or automated assistance, growing attention is shifting towards human–AI collaboration, where learners and educators engage with AI as interactive partners in knowledge construction, problem solving, inquiry, feedback, reflection, and decision making. This creates opportunities for personalised learning, learner agency, and teacher augmentation, while raising concerns about over-reliance, accuracy and bias, academic integrity, cognitive engagement, privacy, and the preservation of human judgement and autonomy.

These opportunities and challenges highlight the need to move beyond technology-centred approaches, towards understanding how humans and AI can collaborate effectively and responsibly for learning. Research is needed to identify the conditions, pedagogies, interaction processes, and design principles that enable productive human–AI partnerships across educational contexts. Such work is timely for advancing the theoretical understanding of AI-mediated learning and informing the design of educational technologies, pedagogical practices, assessment, and responsible AI policies.

This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances in human–AI collaboration for learning. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and design-oriented contributions that investigate how learners, educators, and AI systems can collaborate to support meaningful, effective, personalised, and responsible learning. Contributions may address human–AI interaction and collaboration processes, AI-supported learning and pedagogy, learner agency and self-regulation, cognitive and metacognitive engagement, AI literacy and competencies, learning analytics, assessment, and the design and evaluation of human-centred AI learning environments.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Human–AI collaboration and interaction in learning;
• Generative AI and AI-assisted learning;
• AI as a learning partner, tutor, coach, or thinking partner;
• Human–AI collaboration for problem solving, inquiry, and knowledge construction;
• Learner agency, autonomy, self-regulated learning, and metacognition with AI;
• Cognitive engagement, critical thinking, creativity, and higher-order thinking in human–AI collaboration;
• Teacher–AI collaboration and AI-augmented teaching;
• Learning analytics for understanding human–AI learning processes;
• Design principles and frameworks for human–AI collaborative learning environments.

Dr. Khor Ean Teng
Guest Editor

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-anonymized 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 2000 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.

• human–AI collaboration
• human–AI interaction
• AI in education
• AI-supported learning
• AI learning partners
• learner agency
• cognitive engagement
• learning analytics