Actionable Insights at the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Open Education

Open education is a movement, a practice, a community, and a strategy for enhancing the learning experiences of every student through the use of materials that can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2020). While celebrating the strides that multiple stakeholders in the open education ecosystem have made over the past two decades, MIT Open Learning, along with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, recognizes the need to develop a) more inclusive OER to combat systemic opportunity gaps for learners, b) professional development and support for educators for open approaches to teaching, c) research into how open practices impact student learning, and d) better financial models for making OER production sustainable.

While some directions for future work are clear, the recent rush of Artificial Intelligence into our public consciousness – and its potential impact on open education – makes the development of these pathways all the more consequential and urgent. At this inflection point, it is imperative to rapidly articulate measurable next steps for understanding the landscape of AI and open education. How might AI accelerate inclusive, responsive open education practices? How might institutions develop and provision AI resources for education as public goods? What inequalities might become more entrenched through AI applications? How will we mitigate these challenges? What objectives should we articulate for the open education field to carry us forward?

To address these questions, MIT Open Learning is announcing a 2024 call for proposals from practitioners in open education and AI from around the world. We invite individual authors or groups of authors from and across higher education institutions, nonprofits, philanthropy, and industry working in AI to submit proposals for rapid response papers or multimedia projects that explore the future of open education in an ecosystem inhabited and shaped by AI systems.

Proposals could explore current or future efforts to build public AI tools for open education, identify infrastructural prerequisites to building AI-based public goods, or describe implications of AI for open educational initiatives and resources. Our goal will be to disseminate the productions to the public under an open license and to bring contributors and funders together into conversations that will catalyze research, infrastructure, industry, and teaching innovations to advance open education for the benefit of all learners. 

• Proposals may bear on the intersection of AI and open education in formal and informal settings across primary, secondary, post-secondary, professional, lifelong learning, government, OER production, policy and advocacy settings internationally.

• Proposals may spotlight empirical research, practices, projects, initiatives or innovation statements related to the parameters and possibilities of AI + open education.

• Priority will be given to proposals from multi-institutional and multidisciplinary collaborations and to proposals that present actionable insights and fundable innovations for philanthropies and other supporters to consider.

• Brief (one-page) abstracts summarizing the proposals will be due September 1, 2024. The submission portal will open July 15, 2024.

• An international jury of experts in AI and open education chaired by MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) research scientist Sarah Schwettmann will select approximately 20 abstracts whose authors will receive funding from MIT Open Learning to prepare rapid response papers and/or multimedia projects that will be due November 15, 2024 (see further details below). 

• Papers and projects will be published January 21, 2025. 

Proposed papers and productions should be aware of UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (2019) and should aim to align with those recommendations. Other guiding principles for proposals can also be found in the Capetown Declaration (2008) and its CPT+10 update (2018) and in the Creative Commons’ guiding principles for regulating Generative AI in the interest of a healthy commons.

Submission Process

Please submit a one-page abstract outlining your idea for a short (approximately 2,500-word) paper or short (approximately 10-minute) media production using the submission form at the bottom of this page.  The submissions that the jury selects for publication will receive awards of $2,500 upon publication.  

Timeline

• July 15: Call for papers announced, submission portal opens

• September 1: Abstracts due to jury 

• September 30: Abstracts selected

• November 15: Final papers/productions due to jury

• January 21, 2025: Papers/productions published and awards distributed 

• Spring 2025: A series of in-person and online conversations will take place, featuring contributors, jury members, advisors, and other stakeholders

Topics

Topics of interest include uses of AI to accelerate open education in schools, lifelong learning channels, and institutions. Potential illustrative topics include the intersection of AI + open education as it relates to:

• Inclusive open educational resources (OER) and practices

• Human-centered education

• LLM transparent infrastructure and open licensing issues

• Professional development and support for educators

• Innovative teaching approaches, tools, and technology 

• New knowledge discovery (search) and learning modalities

• Research on student learning 

• New financial models for making open scalable and sustainable

• Minority-serving institutions’ initiatives and perspectives 

• Ethical and legal implications of AI-enhanced open education

• Accessibility principles and practices 

• Climate change and climate justice

• Creativity, the arts, and what it means to be human 

For inquiries or additional information, please contact [email protected].

Work Cited: 

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2020). Open Education Strategy.

https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Hewlett-OpenEd-Strategy-2020.pdf