Davinia Hernández-Leo,
director of the Interactive and Distributed Technologies Research Group for Education (TIDE) of the DTIC of the UPF

The intrinsic relationship between education and planetary wellbeing is self-evident. Quality education is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set in the United Nations General Assembly’s 2030 Agenda. Education also plays a key role in training professionals and citizens who are capable of building a more just and sustainable world. In this article, I will briefly discuss how information and communication technology (ICT) can improve learning and teaching tasks. I will also present a specific case driven by our university, in which ICT is used to support teachers in designing learning that incorporates competencies for sustainability and the SDGs.

ICT can improve learning. Let’s take a highly topical example: generative artificial intelligence (AI) applied to learning. Clearly, its use is not suitable for all types of learning activities, given the risks of dependency or substitution of learning processes, as well as the ethical implications. However, an informed and responsible design in the use of AI can bring benefits to learning, mitigating and compensating for these risks to some extent. Such approaches can result in more effective, efficient, authentic, and motivating and engaging activities. They also promote AI literacy, an increasingly important aspect of digital competence in all disciplines. Moreover, this literacy is applicable to the use of personal digital tools, especially in competencies related to self-protection and digital wellbeing, which are essential when interacting, for example, with social networks. Here are some specific examples:

• Text-generating AI produces unreliable and biased writings, sometimes including terms not considered by the person interacting with the tool. Having students analyse reliability, bias, and the resulting terms in text generation provides them with a high-level, demanding, and potentially effective learning challenge.

• Text-generating AIs are particularly good at text correction. Using an AI tool to review the spelling, grammar, and coherence of a text originally written by a student enables more efficient learning times, as feedback is immediate and complementary to what a teacher can provide.

• Multiple professions are incorporating AI as a work tool, as it enables increased productivity and higher-quality results. This reality has been especially clear in fields such as translation or software programming. Each discipline must consider the cases in which it is necessary to work on authentic learning activities, i.e. activities that offer connections and prepare students to solve real-life problems, where AI tools are accessible.

• AI offers opportunities for personalized learning, interactivity in active learning (e.g. a dialogue with a conversational agent simulating a historical figure), and increased capacity for prototyping in project development. If well harnessed, these opportunities can be motivating and engaging. In other words, they can mobilize more intrinsic motivation in our students related to their curiosity, enthusiasm, and interest in the subjects.

ICT can also facilitate teachers’ tasks. This includes support for better design of learning activities, management and adaptation of activities while they are being carried out, and assessment, as well as promoting sharing and collaboration among teachers. A notable example from our university is the ABPxODS platform, which enables guided authorship of project-based learning designs that incorporate competencies for sustainability. The design of the underlying technology considers elements of teacher wellbeing related to supporting autonomy, competence, and relationships with other teachers. Among other features, the platform enables the sharing of designs among teachers from different educational levels. It currently includes more than 25 designs created by professors from various disciplines at Pompeu Fabra University.

Our research group, TIDE, located in UPF’s Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), has been working on proposals and studies on how the use of ICT and AI can enrich the quality of education and promote training oriented towards planetary wellbeing. This means taking into account both students’ and teachers’ wellbeing.