“Artificial Intelligence for Everyone” (AIE). At current COVID times, learners are increasingly responsible for their own learning at all levels of education. Lack of motivation and of a pleasurable learning experience is also a key driver for school dropout, where seeds can be sowed that have a long term negative impact on engaging with learning. It is thus more important than ever to work on improving student engagement and motivation. We offer a blended learning solution which a personalized and learning webpage that in addition to engaging students with adaptable presentation modalities, helps teachers with preparing for a flipped classroom. The teacher has information about the type of mistakes that the students make, what their level of proficiency is and how engaged they are while studying. Our approach is specially suitable for underprivileged learners who need special attention and support. Our goal is to offer an adaptable, personalized learning experience that leads to a repetitive learning behavior of all learners, especially the ones that need motivation and support. Context: Research advances in artificial intelligence, computer gaming, biometrics, artificial intelligence and pedagogy enable the development of a novel website for personalized learning to tackle these challenges. We deploy a digital tool in the form of the webpage to deliver high quality training which is inclusive for everyone. Our approach resonates well with the challenges related to COVID. With a teacher´s web user interface, we prepare teachers for blended teaching. Our aim is to help teachers in adapting to online learning by providing information about the challenges that the students face, the proficiency level of the class and how engaging the student find the class subject. With our personalized learning approach we aim to provide training that resonates with disadvantaged groups to whom a positive learning experience that encourages repetitive learning behavior is especially beneficial. Our webpage based approach builds bridges across geographical boundaries. Our flexible, modular design and variety of presentation modalities caters to different social, ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups. Although we make use of state of the art user modeling, the user is always in charge. He or she can choose to follow our advice or choose to interact with the learning material in a different way. We thus facilitate a sense of initiative and control for our users. Our learning system can offer various types of courses. We develop a course on artificial intelligence which has the goal to introduce the technology to the general public, no math background is needed. The long term goal for a subsequent project is to train users in working with artificial intelligence. A necessary step towards that goal which we deliver as a part of this project is to understand what AI is and how it is entering the labor market. The project thus contributes to improvements in terms of levels of skills for employability, competence, opportunities for professional development and to the needs of the labor market. Project aim and objectives: Our primary aim is to offer accessible personalized training via a website that is designed for providing a pleasant learning experience and for facilitating repetitive learning behavior. We want to observe increased participation rate in underprivileged target groups that train with the website including adults that do not have a high school diploma and students that struggle with studying on their own due to COVID. Our secondary aim is to open the door of artificial intelligence for everybody with a special emphasis on the underprivileged part of the European population. Partnership: 7 Partners from 3 EU countries (ISL, DE, ESP) form a transnational cooperation partnership. Methodological approach and key outputs: The main target group is re- and upskilling training participants. The personalized webpage enabled blended training is, however, also applicable for University and high school students and can be subsequently adapted to elementary school students. The participants set up the webpage based training program and users will be engaged in experimenting laboratory collaborative activities in a blended classroom setting. Impact and long term benefits: A) Address the needs of the underprivileged part of the European population by offering personalized learning that encourages repetitive learning behavior and challenges the current scenario where less education means less engagement with learning activities. B) Raise awareness of the importance of personalized, adaptable training that facilitates repeated learning experiences. C) Give teachers in vocational training and the educational system innovative instruments and tools to overcome limitations set by COVID where teachers can not see how well the educational material is resonating with their students.
Create an AI enabled new online learning platform together with a course on AI, which would enable vocational training students to gain solid foundations in AI, from a theoretical, practical and also ethical perspective, that they can build on and extend with further AI education and also by applying AI in their professional and private lives. Create an AI enabled new learning platform, which uses state of the art affect and attention sending AI models to track and predict the affective and attentional state of learners in real time. Create an AI enabled new learning platform, which is responsive to different learner needs and enables personalization. Create a course on digital communications, which encourages and develops critical thinking skills and empowers vocational training students in having a voice and express their opinion after learning about a theme from different points of view.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly a part of everyday life, both professional and private. Despite this fact, AI was not a part of the general vocational training curriculum in partner vocational training schools at the start of this project. We addressed this need. There is also a need for improving critical thinking skills in the modern era of information overflow and echo chambers. Additionally, there is a gap when it comes to the use of modern AI technology for leisure activities and for education. We also wanted to take a step towards bridging this gap by developing a new online learning platform, where we apply state of the art AI models with the goal to improve user adaptability and personalization. Yet another goal was that learning and education needs to be more enjoyable in order to successfully compete for the time of learners with various distractions. Our new platform is designed with the goal in mind that learners have a positive learning experience. In this project we brought together vocational training schools, University scientists, and a company with a strong AI research and development focus and strong track record of developing AI enabled learning software together to address these needs.