AI and the Digitalisation of Education: Challenges and Opportunities

The blog series highlights perspectives surfaced in NORRAG’s Policy Insights collections: The Digitalisation of Education and AI and Digital Inequities to bring those perspectives into dialogue with others working in education policy, planning, practice and research. The series shares under-represented and innovative ideas on the role and futures of AI and other digital technologies in education.

The promise of digital innovation in education is widely understood. However, the introduction of technology into education has never–alone–solved the problems that education faces, at the same time as it creates novel and unexpected problems. Yet processes of digitalisation have transformed education – and will continue to do so–in ways that are complex, evolving, and deeply unequal. Despite resurgent interest in technology in education policy, planning and practice, as well as in research, many areas that are critical to understanding the digitalisation of education remain under-studied, and the evidence that does exist remains under-shared.

Furthermore, since the release of Chat GPT in November 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved to the forefront of attention of stakeholders working in education policy and practice. While many are enthusiastic about the potential opportunities AI offers for improving education systems and classroom practice, others are wary of the bias that AI represents, the potential of AI to contribute to an ever-widening inequality gap, and its ethical pitfalls. The use of AI goes hand in hand with the accelerating digitalisation of education.

The blog series is curated and edited by Maren Elfert, NORRAG blog editor. We welcome blog contributions from education practitioners, policy makers and researcher-practitioners. In particular, we welcome contributions from experts whose perspectives may be under-represented in international education policy discussions, including from the Global South.

The series invites empirically-grounded and critical contributions on the challenges and opportunities of AI and the digitisation of education to create a more equitable educational landscape, including (but not limited to) the following themes: 

• Datafication, surveillance, ethical challenges and citizenship
• Governance of AI, privatisation and “multistakeholderism”
• Diversity and digital divides 
• Digital citizenship and consumerism
• Technological and AI colonialism: techno-solutionism, anglo-centrism in linguistic and cultural content, digital neocolonialism
• Digitalisation and the right to education, quality, equity and social justice 
• Government procurement, value creation models, and financialisation

Please refer to the general guidelines for NORRAG blog submissions to contribute.

Find below the most recent posts in the AI and the Digitalisation of Education Blog Series