AI4EDU: Conversational AI assistant for teaching and learning

AI4EDU seeks to innovate school education by investigating, implementing and evaluating forward-looking, innovative research approaches, technologies and applications of Artificial Intelligence in Education that enable new, innovative, flexible, personalised, engaging and effective ways of teaching and learning, in the context of the growing challenges created by the digital transformation of education.

More specifically, AI4EDU will contribute to the following general, underlying goals:

• Facilitate, enhance and personalise learning by developing and implementing student-facing AI applications.
• Empower teachers and support teaching and assessment goals by developing and implementing teacher-facing AI applications.
• Increase our knowledge and understanding about AI and cultivate knowledge and skills of students and teachers about how AI applications work, their potential and limitations.
• Evaluate the educational impact, usability and acceptance of AI applications in real educational settings.
• Provide evidence of realistic AI use cases in education, addressing issues of ethics, transparency, equity and reliability.
• Understand the implications of the integration of AI in education.

Accordingly, the general objectives of AI4EDU are:

1. to investigate, develop, implement and evaluate next generation intelligent educational assistants, powered by leading edge AI and language technologies, designed to conversationally interact with students and to support teachers and students in fulfilling their teaching and learning goals, in a way that makes them acceptable as engaging, flexible, effective, reliable and helpful partners.
2. to investigate the implications of the adoption of the developed AI applications for teaching and learning and the aspects of their ethical, transparent, inclusive, and equitable use in educational settings, and to produce evidence-based recommendations for the educational community, as well as policy guidelines for the effective deployment of AI in education.

To achieve its objectives, AI4EDU brings together partners with high expertise, complementary skills and experience relevant to the inter-disciplinary domain of AIEd and well aligned to the project objectives and tasks. The AI4EDU consortium comprises six participating organisations, coming from four EU member states: One Research Center, Athena Research and Innovation Center (ARC), two Universities, Lulea University of Technology (LTU) and the University of Cyprus (UCY), and three Educational Organisations: Ellinogermaniki Agogi School (EA), Drumcondra Education Centre (DEC), and the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (CPI). The AI4EDU participants cover all the technological and educational aspects to achieve the project’s objectives.