A recent study on EU digital education content highlights that a lack of widely agreed upon vocabulary and terminology among stakeholders can result in confusion and inconsistency, and hamper the establishment of quality criteria.

This is exacerbated by the upsurge of DEC that is created, described and recommended by artificial intelligence (AI). As part of the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 and following the Council Recommendation on the key enabling factors for successful digital education and training, the Commission established an expert group to address these issues and draft guidelines for educators, Member State authorities and education providers.

Generating education content

Since the generative AI boom following the release of ChatGPT 3.5, educators have used these tools to share their experiences, learn to write appropriate prompts and adjust learning and assessment. Despite fast uptake, efficiency and impact research on generative AI in education is still new. Services that facilitate the creation of teaching sequences or scenarios, or revision and training tutors for students, are in development. Existing solutions include examples such as NOLEJ, Redmenta, Diffit and Jamworks.

Generative AI could change how educators and publishers create content and teach and offer personalised support. Tasks like content generation (summaries, key points, glossaries) and educational activities (memorisation, comprehension) can have real efficiency gains. This is an unprecedented opportunity to anticipate and reconsider teaching, learning and assessment approaches, and biases, copyright issues and DEC quality.

Finding and selecting education content

Discovering and selecting relevant DEC requires a combination of AI and semantic web solutions. Together they can effectively link vocabularies, describe content (and its contexts) and define curricula and skills using natural language search, making it easier to navigate a multitude of DEC offerings.

Education content through adaptive learning

Adaptive teaching and learning combine DEC with AI tools to offer personalised individual or group courses (pace and progressiveness, feedback and remediation). The European EdTech sector and educational publishers have explored these avenues for some time, e.g. in France (P2IA - innovative partnership on AI) and the Netherlands (NOLAI). These tools support differentiation, formative assessment and autonomous learning; however, some impacts (combining several AIs, scaling up) have yet to be measured.