Keynotes

The social context has a significant impact on the way we socialize and on how each person develops their identity. Family, school, culture, media, and other social influences shape our beliefs, values, attitudes, and expectations from an early age. As a result, biases and stereotypes related to gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, religion, disability, and other personal characteristics become part of our everyday interactions and experiences. These biases are also present in educational environments, from kindergarten to university, where they can influence participation, academic opportunities, expectations, and the sense of belonging of students. This keynote introduces the different types of biases and stereotypes that can affect educational settings, with a particular focus on unconscious biases. It explores how these hidden assumptions are formed, how they influence decision-making and behaviours, and why it is important to identify and challenge them. The keynote also encourages reflection on inclusive educational practices and provides insights into how educators can contribute to creating more diverse, equitable, and welcoming learning environments for all students.

Many technological novelties launched over the course of the last century contributed to an evolutionary process toward a student-centered vision of education. Pedagogical theories advocating this vision existed for a long time, but the pedagogical practices were bound by technological affordances that varied widely over time and across disciplines. On the other hand, several technology-led transformations were accompanied by inflated expectations in relation to their anticipated impact. Despite the availability of pedagogical frameworks and supporting technologies, teacher-centered practices continued to be too common in several scientific and technological domains, particularly in STEM higher education degrees. This status quo has persisted to this day, albeit increasingly challenged by the rise of e-learning solutions during the last quarter of the past century, and the introduction of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the beginning of the current century. MOOCs promised to empower student autonomy, but the pedagogical effectiveness of free courses was hampered by several reasons, e.g., extremely high-attrition rates, lack of formal recognition, language and cultural factors, and particularly the pedagogical limitations imposed by peer-support. Although further challenging the role of teachers in a world where the source of knowledge was already shifting away from the pulpit, these limitations ensured that MOOCs alone wouldn’t make teachers redundant. While it may sound provocative to raise this question, it is true that the educational disruption caused by AI pushes this challenge to another level, and indeed teaching as we knew it until just a couple of years ago has already become redundant. Student empowerment leveraged by AI is yet hindered by several factors, namely unequal accessibility and epistemic skills, but it will nevertheless trigger an irrevocable departure from teacher-centered pedagogical practices that survived almost untouched through the e-learning age. Such as the student side of the equation transitioned from paper-based methods into e-learning, so will the teachers’ side transition into what we may loosely call “e-teaching”. The complementary leg of this journey, from e-learning to e-teaching, is already under way and calls for the discussion of new teacher roles, new learning content and new assessment methods, all of which were not possible before AI was available.