Learning with AI: Balancing technology, pedagogy and ethics

In this episode, we have invited Carla Aerts, currently Strategic Advisor at Erasmus X Innovation at Erasmus University of Rotterdam, to explore the potential of AI to reshape higher education, balancing the integration of advanced technologies with ethical considerations.

Join us as Carla shares her two decades of experience in EdTech, discussing how personalised learning and interdisciplinary approaches enhance educational outcomes.

In this article, we summarise part of that conversation, but you can listen to the full interview in our podcast:

Also available on:

Balzhan Orazbayeva:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Carla Aerts who is a Strategic Advisor with Erasmus X Innovation at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. But that is only one of the many affiliations and interesting things that Carla does. Can you start by telling us more about yourself?

Carla Aerts:
It’s great to be here. Yes, I’ve been involved in the world of EdTech and learning with technologies for over 20 years, from early years to higher education. I’m very much in the formal and informal education space for younger people on the whole.

I fell into this field by accident quite a while ago and found it so interesting that I increasingly got enveloped by it. I’m also very interested in the science of learning and the learning sciences to influence how we look at the use and the design of these technologies.

One thing education hasn’t been very good at is looking at the potential of these technologies to change things. It’s always been more of a late arrival to the table and a late adopter, and higher education even later than the school sector.

With that later adoption often comes an approach of retrofits, so trying to fit the technology into what we are doing now, rather than using the technology to do something else or to augment what we are doing.

Balzhan Orazbayeva:
What is the role of EdTech and AI in revolutionising education?

Carla Aerts:
The idea of revolutionising education is a very interesting one because, when you look at the early start-up world in EdTech, before AI came on stream, every start-up I spoke to at the time said that they were going to change education. And every time I asked them what they meant.

There’s no such thing as one way or one form of education. It isn’t just about K12 or higher ed, it’s also about context, cultural relevance and many other things. To revolutionise education at scale, which is what the tech companies are trying to do, is quite hard because it is so messy and contextual.

Also, there has been quite a resistance, or a lack of understanding by education in terms of what is needed to make this successful. I’m not blaming education or educators for that at all, because the aim of education is also to bring stability and certain values and approaches to teaching and learning that give a safe environment in which that can happen. If you start looking at disruption of technology, this can become jeopardised quite easily.

Balzhan Orazbayeva:
I want to touch upon the collaboration and interdisciplinarity side of things. How can AI, EdTech or any other modern technology facilitate these interdisciplinary learning experiences and what are the potential benefits for students and educators?

Carla Aerts:
The world is such a vastly and fast changing place. Whilst we still need domain knowledge that goes very deep, there is a need to communicate effectively and at a reasonable level, to problem-solve together and to tackle the challenges that the world is dealing with. That can’t just happen by each of us sitting in our own corner without engaging in interdisciplinarity. Universities are starting to see that and trying to address it.

What is interesting with the generative AI, the adaptive and personalised learning was not geared to that and also was not developed or designed for that. But with the generative AI, because you’re going into a conversation, you cannot ask very broad questions. These systems are becoming quite good at interdisciplinary questions and dealing with them, to such an extent that I sometimes talk to academic leads or professors who are more engaged in interdisciplinary universities, who are scratching their heads in terms of having their students engage in interdisciplinary methods.

I’m now finding that generative AI is doing that really well, and my students are questioning what they are doing here, because generative AI is doing it maybe even better than them. That doesn’t negate the fact that, ultimately, we have to remain in control of this.

Our interaction with the machine is only going to intensify, intelligence and collective intelligence is going to take on a different shape. But in that interdisciplinary domain, we also need to be able to flip how we deal with these technologies as a collective, because machines will become much more interconnected as well.

We are all exploring how to deal with this, and nobody has the answer because it is evolving so fast. That’s going to be a challenge, but a very interesting one. It is potentially the best gauntlet they can throw us in education, because this is what is going to force the change.

Balzhan Orazbayeva:
What should educators be doing if they want to stay ahead of the curve when trying to effectively integrate those emerging technologies whilst also listening to the needs of the learners?

Carla Aerts:
That is a bit of a million-dollar question, but it’s a good one. It is going faster and faster, but it is very hard to anticipate where it is ultimately heading. And even experts in AI are baffled by some things that happen. How can educators stay ahead of the curve? They can’t really, but they need to move with the curve at least, same for the learners.

A lot of learners will engage with this, maybe more than their educators will, but I think the key here is that we need to give space in education to engage in “serious play” and experiment with these technologies. Bringing learners and their tutors to tackle a challenge in a experimentation and discovery type environment.

They have this wonderful thing at Google where, once a week, they provide engineers with an evening to ideate and come up with new ideas. We need to have a similar approach in education where it is not just about what you are being taught, but also about what you learn through experimenting and discovery.

We need to start building that into university curricula, and that is also where the interdisciplinarity can come to the fore and give students and tutors the time to do that. Seeing serious play as an inherent activity to learning processes.

At Erasmus, they already do quite a lot of events around generative AI, bringing tutors, academics and their students together in workshops to discover together what this all means.

What is interesting too is that we are in an era where the humanities are becoming increasingly important again. And experimenting with this from a humanities angle, rather than just applied sciences, will be very interesting and necessary.

Ready for more?

The UIIN Ireland Forum: Bridging Boundaries for Effective External Engagement, is hosted in partnership with Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in Sligo on 11 September 2024.

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