Ethical AI can support digital education, says Commission’s director

“Ethical and non-discriminatory” artificial intelligence can support personalisation in digital education, a senior European Commission official told Euractiv in an interview, reflecting on the 2023’s edition of the DigiEduHack annual event.

“The Commission launched the Digital Education Hackathon back in 2019 and since then it has significantly grown and improved,” said Antoaneta Angelova-Krasteva, Director at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC).

She said that in 2023, 39 local hackathons had taken place, “engaging more than 1,500 participants”.

Taking stock of “lessons learned and the feedback of participants from previous editions,” DG EAC decided to expand the “Digital Education Hackathon Days from two to eight, so that hosting organisations such as schools or universities can have flexibility in organising their local events”.

Angelova-Krasteva also stressed that DG EAC’s priority is to “promote further this feedback culture.”

Building on this, she said that thanks to the DigiEduHack event, her team learnt there was “a strong interest in challenges related to emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence or virtual reality, or related to solutions linked to digital well-being”.

Spreading awareness is another topic where stakeholders expect the Commission’s engagement.

To this end, Angelova-Krasteva said that “a key source of information for all education and training policies and initiatives at EU level” was the European Education Area Portal, adding that the Commission “also count on social media as an important channel to disseminate our policies and talk directly to Europeans from different ages.”

Angelova-Krasteva then mentioned the roles of “Commission representations in the member states” and “National Erasmus + Agencies,” who play a key role in spreading awareness, also considering they are better placed to know “national contexts and stakeholder networks”.

Supporting digitally skilled and empowered Europeans

Angelova-Krasteva recalled that “education is an exclusive competence of the member states”, with the EU having only a complementing role.

Therefore, asked to comment on DigiEduHack’s choice of this year’s topic, which was “putting people at the centre of digital education,” she answered that there is a need to make the digital transformation “people-driven,” and that “to make this a reality, we need digitally skilled and empowered Europeans”.

Quoting from the Commission’s 2030 Digital Decade targets “of 80% of the Europeans having basic digital skills and reaching 20 million ICT specialists”, Angelova-Krasteva pointed out that in 2023 there were “only 54% of the Europeans with basic digital skills.”

Looking at the current trends in the EU, by 2030, “we will simply not reach the targets”, she warned.

To support those goals, Angelova-Krasteva explained that “targeted support comes also from European funding and in particular Erasmus+”, while “initiatives like Girls Go Circular, on the other hand, aim at closing the gender digital divide, having equipped more than 32,000 girls with digital and entrepreneurship skills.”

She said that Erasmus+, the EU programme for education and training, was equipped with “a total budget of €28 billion for 2021-2027”, and targeted its funding towards digital education, for which “the appetite of the community is remarkable.”

Artificial intelligence and non-discrimination

Coming back to this year’s most-eyed tech issue, artificial intelligence, Angelova-Krasteva said that “AI supports personalisation by tailoring the learning material to students’ proficiency levels and needs”.

Yet, she added that the impact of AI depends on “how well it is integrated in the broader digital education ecosystem,” calling for AI tools to be “developed and deployed in an ethical and non-discriminatory manner.”

To this end, she acknowledged the importance of the EU AI Act, yet laid the emphasis on promoting “skilled European citizens who are well-aware of the opportunities and risks this technology brings”.

She explained that the Commission had published Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence, which she called “an important step towards supporting teachers in the use of these technologies.”

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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