Advocates of AI in Education (AIEd) assert that the current generation of technologies, collectively dubbed artificial intelligence, including generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), promise results that can transform our conceptions of what education looks like. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate how educators perceive GenAI and its potential use and future impact on education. Adopting the methodology of collective writing as an inquiry, this study reports on the participating educators' perceived grey areas (i.e. issues that are unclear and/or controversial) and recommendations on future research. The grey areas reported cover decision-making on the use of GenAI, AI ethics, appropriate levels of use of GenAI in education, impact on learning and teaching, policy, data, GenAI outputs, humans in the loop and public-private partnerships. Recommended directions for future research include learning and teaching, ethical and legal implications, ownership/authorship, funding, technology, research support, AI metaphor and types of research. Each theme or subtheme is presented in the form of a statement, followed by a justification. These findings serve as a call to action to encourage a continuing debate around GenAI and to engage more educators in research. The paper concludes that unless we can ask the right questions now, we may find that, in the pursuit of greater efficiency, we have lost the very essence of what it means to educate and learn.

Research informing adult education teachers’ didactic practices in distance education is scarce. Approaching the adult learner’s perspectives on how distance education is perceived is key to informing future initiatives. This study explores adult learners’ perception of distance education, concentrating on aspects such as, social presence, course structure, and perceived learning and satisfaction. A survey was distributed to teachers (n = 78) in five schools organising adult distance education. Findings show that teacher accessibility and course structure correlated positively with social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction. Overall, adult learners are satisfied with their distance teaching. A challenge facing adult distance education is to create a sense of social presence despite the high demand for flexibility. Thus, we explored learner perceptions of benefits and challenges in distance education and structured these into social, cognitive, spatio-temporal, emotional, and technical dimensions. Findings reveal that one challenge in the social dimension was a lack of connection with peers, and a benefit in the cognitive dimension referred to autonomy and self-regulation. These findings are important as educational institutions and policymakers may strive for high flexibility, which in turn may lead to lower group cohesion and a lack of social presence.

In this paper, we begin our process of incorporating an AI bot in an online chat tutoring setting as a support for the tutor. We explore how an AI bot could give suggestions for tutor messages, although the human tutor will control how to communicate with the student. Tutoring, an important dimension of networked learning, has long been seen as a beneficial approach to students’ learning. An AI bot has the potential to aid tutors in the tutoring process and contribute to the scalability. The present pilot study was conducted in the tutoring setting of the Math Coach program. In the program, teacher students aid students from upper primary school to upper secondary school in mathematics through an online text-based chat system. Llama2 was used as a large language model (LLM), fine-tuned for Swedish comprehension utilizing the Math Coach system's chat logs. Four coaches, teacher students at a technical Swedish university and active in the Math Coach program, were invited to interact with the AI bot and participate in a group discussion. The coaches interacted individually with the AI bot while the chat conversation was displayed on a monitor so all participants could discuss the interaction while it took place. A semi-structured interview approach was taken and the participants were also encouraged to 'think aloud' about their experience. In the discussions, the coaches expressed surprise by the AI's social aspect. They perceived the AI bot as friendly with a positive attitude and were especially surprised by its ability to correctly place appropriate emojis. The coaches agreed that the AI was able to ask both appropriate and helpful questions and share some good guidance for how to proceed in the problem-solving process. However, they felt that the AI bot was not able to offer sufficient mathematical guidance, oftentimes the AI bot was confidently wrong. It also wrote too long messages, which humans would typically separate into several chat messages, and did not wait for a response but instead moved too quickly towards the solution. Moving forward we plan to address the effects of improved prompts on the AI bot and continue finetuning the LLM. We will continue to conduct pilot studies and eventually conduct more large-scale empirical studies.

Applications of learning analytics (LA) can raise concerns from students about their privacy in higher education contexts. Developing effective privacy-enhancing practices requires a systematic understanding of students' privacy concerns and how they vary across national and cultural dimensions. We conducted a survey study with established instruments to measure privacy concerns and cultural values for university students in five countries (Germany, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States; N = 762). The results show that students generally trusted institutions with their data and disclosed information as they perceived the risks to be manageable even though they felt somewhat limited in their ability to control their privacy. Across the five countries, German and Swedish students stood out as the most trusting and least concerned, especially compared to US students who reported greater perceived risk and less control. Students in South Korea and Spain responded similarly on all five privacy dimensions (perceived privacy risk, perceived privacy control, privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, and non-self-disclosure behavior), despite their significant cultural differences. Culture measured at the individual level affected the antecedents and outcomes of privacy concerns. Perceived privacy risk and privacy control increase with power distance. Trusting beliefs increase with a desire for uncertainty avoidance and lower masculinity. Non-self-disclosure behaviors rise with power distance and masculinity and decrease with more uncertainty avoidance. Thus, cultural values related to trust in institutions, social equality and risk-taking should be considered when developing privacy-enhancing practices and policies in higher education.

DET HÄR KAPITLET tar upp hur strukturerad kamratåterkoppling kan utveckla elevernas visuella idéer i bild med hjälp av digitala verktyg. Det undervisningsupplägg som presenteras är en uppgift där eleverna gör självporträtt i form av fotografiska stilleben och ger varandra återkoppling redan under skissarbetet och inte på den färdiga produkten. Två typer av återkoppling diskuteras, visuell och textbaserad. Båda modellerna är fördelaktiga att använda för att stärka elevernas idéutveckling vilket framhävs i grundskolans kursplan för bildämnet. 

This article focuses on developing the idea process in visual art education by using digital peer feedback. In the school subject visual art, the visual idea process, e.g. when students sketch their ideas, is an important phase in a project. When an idea takes form, there is the possibility for considering the idea in a new way, for others to study and discuss it, and most importantly, for generating new ideas. By digitally sharing their visual ideas and providing feedback, students might become more aware of their own and others' processes. This study aimed to explore how eighth-grade students develop and share visual ideas supported by digital peer feedback. Thematic analysis was used to identify different types of feedback provided by students. A qualitative survey was used to investigate student perceptions of the feedback. Many students appreciated receiving feedback from peers. Some students made significant or minor changes to their visual ideas based on the peer feedback, while other students abandoned their initial sketches and created entirely new ones, or did not make any changes to their initial idea. These results suggest that giving and receiving peer feedback is something that needs to be practiced in different specific school subjects. 

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the paradigm shift it is able to create have been the centre of attention among education researchers, following recent developments in the area of AI in education. AI has the potential to enable new forms of learning, but also poses some challenges and risks. While it is well-established that information technologies can be used to promote inter-personal connections between learners, between learners and teachers, and inside learning communities, such educational relationships can be significantly impacted by the introduction of AI in education settings.

Education fiction, also known as social science fiction, has recently been employed by researchers in an effort to produce fiction that speculates about the future and inform better decisions for today. This paper analyses education fiction to explore how educational relationships might change in a future infused by AI. Following recent publications that utilise education fiction to speculate about the future, the authors of this paper thematically analysed 98 stories written by researchers, dealing with speculations around AI in applied education settings. The focus of this thematic analysis is on two themes: human relationships mediated by AI, and blurred boundaries between humans and computers in education settings.

The fictions written by researchers touch upon the affective benefits of a network that is created between computers and humans, as well as between humans, mediated by computers. AI tools are presented as trusted allies or even friends of the students, nurturing a more welcoming approach to the introduction of AI in learning communities. AI seems to be useful in situations where group skills are necessary, as it appears to act as a facilitator and a mentor, helping students develop teamwork skills and scaffolding communication between peers and between humans and computers. In contrast, certain stories highlight the potential dangers in the development of core writing or thinking skills, if students were to outsource related tasks to AI tools. Therefore, an over-reliance on AI tools could have unintended consequences for learners.

These findings point to the need for sustaining discussions around digital tools and human relationships, especially since AI develops and becomes more useful to a wider audience. The paper also suggests that speculative education fiction can help us imagine different scenarios and outcomes of using AI in learning. As AI becomes more prevalent in education, it is important to think about how to use it in ethical and beneficial ways that respect the values and goals of education.

Digital technologies are increasingly used in assessment. On the one hand, this use offers opportunities for teachers to practice assessment more effectively, and on the other hand, it brings challenges to the design of pedagogically sound and responsible digital assessment. There is a lack of validated instruments and models that explain, assess and support teachers' critical pedagogical practice of digital assessment. This explorative work first develops and validates a survey instrument to examine teachers' digital assessment practices. Secondly, we build a model to investigate to what extent teachers' pedagogical digital assessment knowledge is a foundation for the future of digital assessment (ie, authentic, accessible, automated, continuous and responsible). A total of 219 university teachers at a large European university participated in the survey study. Factor exploratory analysis and structural equation modelling were used to validate the reliability and validity of items and internal causal relations of factors. The results show the survey is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing teachers' digital assessment practice in higher education. Teachers' pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of digital assessment is critical, while teachers' technological pedagogical knowledge seems to have a more limited impact on the future of digital assessment. 

Teacher educators’ distinct and dual task of educating future teachers includes using digital tools to support students’ ongoing learning while exemplifying appropriate teaching strategies where the use of digital tools, such as response systems (RSs), are commonly occurring. RSs have been used in higher education for a long time, and many studies discuss how larger student groups answering multiple-choice questions during lectures contribute to student participation and learning. However, there is limited research on RSs, particularly related to teacher education. Therefore, this interview study aims to explore for what purposes teacher educators use RSs in teaching and what advantages and limitations they experience. In the thematic analysis, we found that the teacher educators used RSs to teach simultaneously as they were role models on how to use digital tools for learning. They used anonymous open-text answers more than multiple-choice questions to support student participation, immediately assess, and provide feedback in both larger and smaller groups. The complexity of time management connected to the use of RSs was highlighted. RSs were also used to initiate discussions with the teacher students about the purposes, advantages, and limitations of using digital tools for learning. 

During teacher education programs, teacher students are expected to develop the digital competence necessary for their future roles as teachers. A vital aspect of this competence involves integrating digital tools into educational activities. Some digital tools, such as response systems, are designed and used to encourage student participation during educational activities. This study explores how teacher students use different functions in various response systems during their student teaching, practically applying what they learned in an ICT course during the teacher education program. Semi-structured interviews were thematically analyzed, with activity theory as a framework to discuss the themes. The findings reveal that while most teacher students used response systems during their student teaching, the extent and manner of use varied significantly. Frequent users reported positive experiences, integrating response systems as part of their teaching strategy, while occasional and non-users faced barriers related to theoretical grounding, relevance to the subject of English, community support, and the division of labor. These results highlight the importance of aligning digital tools with educational objectives and providing teacher students with theoretical and practical support during their training. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on integrating digital tools in teacher education and provides insights into digital competence development within teacher education programs.