Davos 2024: Education Meets AI

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Nzinga Qunta, Business News Anchor, SABC: A very good morning and welcome to the session titled Education Meets Artificial Intelligence. My name is Nzinga Qunta and I am a business news anchor on the public broadcaster in South Africa, the SABC, and it's my great pleasure to be moderating this discussion, which is going to take a look at the many opportunities presented by artificial intelligence for learning, but also the uncharted risk for learners.

Artificial intelligence is set to generate trillions of dollars worth of economic value and it means that in order to thrive in the future, people need to learn how to live and work with AI. But I think, more importantly, learn with and about artificial intelligence. So, what are the risks that AI presents for learning, and what are the emerging best practices? And, how do public and private sector companies adapt to, deal with and leverage this new era of education?

To help us understand this topic, I'm joined today by Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, he's a Minister of Education in the United Arab Emirates. Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, the minister of Digital Transformation in Slovenia. Hadi Partovi is the founder and chief executive officer of Code.org and Jeffrey Tarr, the Chief Executive Officer of Skillsoft. This session is being live-streamed, which means that we have people from around the world watching both in this room and online.

If you'd like to add to the conversation, you can use the hashtag #WEF24. Thank you so much to our panellists for being here. Minister, perhaps I'll start with you. Can you contextualise the risks and opportunities that AI presents, and then give us insight into how you're looking at this and addressing this in the United Arab Emirates?

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates: Yes. So I think AI, as you all know, will affect all sectors and education is not immune to that. Right. And I think the biggest opportunity for any regulator in any country is to identify any change, embrace it and make the most out of it. If you go back in history, and this is nothing new, today we talk about AI specifically, but this has been happening for a long time. If you go back in history, in the late 60s, there were mass teachers protesting the use of calculators, which was a new technology, right, and then scientific calculators.

And then we went on to the Internet and we had kids asking us why should they go to school when they can Google whatever they need online. That puts tremendous pressure on us as academia regulators to change the skillsets that we teach our students and to change the assessment as well. So what we have done right now, is we are finding ways to integrate AI into the education system without disrupting it a lot.

So we've decided to go with the AI tutor, which would not affect the class. The class will be conducted the same way, but if a student does not understand a specific concept, he or she could go to an AI tutor and interact with it. It's built on our own curriculum, so that's something very important for us that the information is accurate. We've run tests to make sure it's ethically appropriate. You don't want any biases to be taught to your students. So we actually had a big hackathon with our best hackers in the country trying to ask the silliest questions, the most appropriate ones, just to see can we ensure that that tool provides accurate information and does not have any biases. So far it's been doing really well. We've also conducted a survey to understand tutoring in the UAE and we've noticed that eight out of ten that take private tutoring improve their grades by about 12%. So there's a big opportunity.

The final element is the way we're approaching this right now is also to democratize tutoring. Today, you have people from a high socioeconomic background that can have access to private tutoring. However, the disadvantaged students might not have someone at home that can explain that concept to them and don't have the means to get a tutor. So by doing this, having a tutor in your pocket, you're levelling the playing field. And I think the success of any educational system lies in its ability to offer socioeconomic mobility to its citizens.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Minister Duh, can I ask you to also give us insight into the Digital Slovenia Strategy for 2030 and how it looks at digital competency specifically?

Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, the minister of Digital Transformation in Slovenia: Thank you so much, for hosting us at this session. So our Digital Slovenian Strategy 2030 was adopted, last year, in March. And of course, digital skills and competencies are one of the top priorities. The biggest challenge that we have in Slovenia at the moment, is that half of our population has at least basic digital skills. So our goal is that by 2030, at least 80% of our population will have at least basic digital skills.

And today we are speaking about AI skills and competencies. If we don't have digital skills, then we cannot speak about AI skills. So we are not discussing only basic digital skills, but also expert skills. So at the moment, in Slovenia, we have around 4.5%, of our population that are ICT experts. We would like to increase this share. So our goal is that we will have at least 10% of our population.

Another thing, in Slovenia, we don't have many women included in the sector. And we believe that this is a lost opportunity because women can be, very good ICT experts, also AI experts. So, at the moment, 17% of our ICT experts are female, we would like to increase this to at least 25% and to increase the number of people that are involved in STEM.

But as my colleague, the Minister mentioned, AI will not only change our work environment. So we don't need AI and digital skills only for our jobs. So we need these skills in our everyday lives because these technologies are changing the way, we are living. That is why, not only for me, but for our government, it is very important that we provide these skills to absolutely everybody, to every citizen in our country. If you want to do that in Slovenia, we have very good public education system, of course, it's the easiest way to cover everybody if you go with, different programmes through the education system, but not all the population is involved in education now; many of us have finished our schooling. So, we need to provide those skills and competencies, also so we can not only speak about the young people, but we need to include also the adults who will, definitely some of them, lose their jobs because of these new technologies. We need to provide them with the skills that are necessary nowadays.

And, as mentioned, digital skills and also AI skills are necessary even with retired people, because they also need to know how to use digital public services. They need to understand how AI works, what is disinformation, misinformation, how these technologies are influencing their daily lives. So, a lot of work is going on on digital skills. It's not only paperwork, so it's not only strategies, but last year, we funded, training for approximately 30,000 citizens. So we are coming from different countries. I am coming from a country of 2 million people, which means 30,000 per year is a lot and we are continuing, with this, mostly free training for our citizens this year and in the forthcoming years.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Okay. Mr Tarr, how do you see AI changing how workforce learning happens?

Jeffrey Tarr, Chief Executive Officer, Skillsoft: Well, the change is huge. In the field of workforce learning or adult learning in general, the topic of skills gaps has been the hot topic. It's a big problem around the world. Generative AI is opening up a whole new set of skills gaps when we haven't solved the first problem.

In my field, generative AI is changing what we teach and it's changing how we teach, both in profound ways in the area of what we teach. This is a technology that is affecting almost every job, not just a handful of people in IT. If the cloud transformation was a big change, this is gigantic because it affects marketing, it affects sales, it affects operations, it affects finance. Every knowledge worker's job will be impacted to some extent and over time I believe we will see every job impacted to some extent.

Now, how we teach is also changing at a dramatic pace. And you heard a little bit about democratizing tutoring. In my world, coaching is a way that people grow at senior levels. I would have lost my job many times in my career if I didn't have a coach, but to extend that to every employee in a company hasn't been possible until today. And, so now we have the emergence of digital coaches, generative AI coaches that are incredibly powerful.

At Skillsoft, that coach has a name. It's Caisy, Conversational AI Simulator. And what we've launched is 60 real-world simulations, everything from delivering a performance review to working with an irate customer, to, you might be surprised, but the most popular one is cultivating compassion and empathy. Real-world simulations, real-world, real-time feedback available to everyone. And where this is going is that personal generative AI coaching is, I believe, before the end of the year, going to be the new front door to learning instead of a search box or something that looks like Netflix for online learning, it's going to be the coach who's going to offer assessments and coaching and hands-on learning and when it's appropriate, videos. The world is changing and it's very exciting.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Fantastic. Mr Partovi, both ministers touched on bias. Minister Al Falasi speaking about the bias that they don't want to impart to learners and Minister Stojmenova Duh speaking about the lack of women in the digital space. Now, your company, Code.org, says that there around 30 million of your students are young women. And the Brookings Institute says that it expects job losses related to AI to disproportionately affect women. There's other vulnerabilities as well that affect women when it comes to AI. How do you believe that these need to be best dealt with going forward?

Hadi Partovi, founder and chief executive officer of Code.org: That's a great question. I have a number of thoughts on the topic. The first is that when people think about job losses due to AI, the risk isn't people losing their job to AI, it's losing their job to somebody else who knows how to use AI. That is going to be a much greater displacement.

So it's not that the worker gets replaced by just a robot or a machine. In most cases, especially for desk jobs, it's that some better educated or more modernly educated worker can do that job because they could be twice as productive or three times as more productive, which increases the imperative to teach how to use these tools to teach with AI, to teach how it works to every citizen and especially to our young people.

When it comes to bias, there are many biases, but these are things that we can help teach people to recognize. Even without AI, the internet has bias. When you Google, you're not always getting unbiased results. You are getting many different results and it's up to you to figure out which ones to trust. And teaching students how to distinguish, you know, facts from misinformation, how to use critical thinking, how to question their sources, these are part of becoming, you know, digitally fluent.

And these are skills that are relevant pre-AI, but even more relevant now in a world as we rely more and more on technology for the education system. But when you think about the risks of AI, I think by far the greatest risk of all is doing nothing and assuming that the education system of decades, really of last century, is going to still be relevant for students today. Increasingly, the public education system, if it does not change, is becoming more and more irrelevant. And countries like Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates are really leading the way in showing that evolution is the only option really for preparing students and we're excited to be working with both countries in terms of how they modernize curriculum.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: And you work with young people, what's their role in making sure that the AI and the models that we see and the way of learning is impacted by them?

Hadi Partovi, Code.org: Well, the first thing I'd say is young people don't view as education as just the education system. You know, they go to school, but they also learn on YouTube, they also push the boundaries of what school tells them they should or shouldn't do. When the school tells them they can't use ChatGPT, that's probably the first thing they'll go and do because if school doesn't want me to do it, I want to know why.

And so they're experimenting, you know, even though ChatGPT by many schools was banned last year, more than half of all teenagers said they plan on using it to do their homework. And, so it's important to recognize that young people, especially teenagers, aren't just going to do what they're told, they're often going to do what they're told not to do and they are exploring, regardless of what the education system is teaching them. And they're experiencing AI in Snapchat and TikTok and well beyond the applications and technologies that they use in school. And what's important is for our school systems to recognize this and be leaders in embracing technology, rather than being laggards, because the kids are going to be getting that technology with or without the school system.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: So let's come back to you. You have a vast amount of courses, teaching AI. What trends are you seeing? Are those changing significantly as the months or years go by?

Jeffrey Tarr, Skillsoft: Well, certainly there's an interest in how to write an effective prompt. Okay, so there's the technology interest. And there's long been interest on the technology side and everything related to AI and machine learning, but what's happening is almost every area of the curriculum is changing because there's hardly an area, at least in workforce learning, corporate learning, where AI doesn't have some role. Now, it doesn't mean the whole course becomes about AI, but if you're leading a customer service team or you're learning how to sell or you're learning marketing, the courses are changing to reflect AI.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Okay. Minister, when we're talking about the risks that are there. Can you give us more insight into those broadly and then are there any that you're picking up specifically in Slovenia or that may be related to the people of Slovenia?

Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Minister of Digital Transformation, Slovenia: Yes. I prefer to speak about challenges first and then I will continue with the risk. My personal biggest concern is exclusion when we are speaking about AI in many different topics.

The first challenge, I see that it takes some time to prepare good programmes. Not everybody likes code and your organization and other organizations that are available. Some people think they prepare good programmes and then they let them out in the market and people start learning and the results might not be, good. So it's really absolutely necessary that here we collaborate, the private sector, the public sector, the countries, that we share best practices, lessons learned, what worked well, what didn't work well, and so on and so on.

Then another challenge is the people that are out of the education system, as mentioned earlier, I agree completely. People learn out of the education system, not only young people, but also elderly people, but not everybody. We have people that are highly motivated and we have people that are not motivated at all. So, this is another challenge, how to motivate them to take part in these programmes that are available. Then the funding part, so who will fund all these, trainings? Of course, the government should do and, we are doing that, but we cannot do that on our own.

In my opinion, the companies should participate there as well. But, as the world is changing, we all need to be aware that we need to invest in ourselves, in our knowledge, just like we are investing in food, in clothing, in travelling, we need to invest in knowledge as well.

Then, we were speaking about teachers, mentors, coaches. I believe that currently throughout the world, not only in Slovenia this is Slovenia specific, but also throughout the world, we don't have enough teachers, enough good coaches and enough good mentors. I'm an electrical engineer, by profession and I don't think that the people who are developing AI are also good coaches. And on the other side, we have good coaches, we have good teachers, but they don't understand how AI works.

So, what we need is to do something, to find teachers, coaches, mentors and employ them as much as possible. So, maybe if we see, in the future, if we want the government to fund such trainings, then we need then we need leaders who understand how these topics are so important. It's not enough that we are speaking here, but we need also our colleagues, our ministers to understand and our ministers of finance, to understand why this is important and how much we can invest.

And, it's not only the leaders, but also the public administrators, because they're preparing then different measures that are going to be implemented in our countries. Then again, really the first thing that we need to start working on is training the teachers, the mentors, the coaches so that they can share their knowledge later on.

Then, another thing is, to really raise trust in these technologies, just as you mentioned in the past, it's always like this when we introduce new technology. There is the fear and we are mostly afraid of things that we don't know. How they work is the same with AI.

So we need to tell what AI does. AI is not taking your jobs, that somebody who knows how to use AI will replace you and so on and so on to really tell them, okay, these are the threats, so you can protect yourself from the threats. And, this is the only way how people will understand that AI is here it's not going anywhere. So we need to embrace it, we need to learn how to not only work with it, but to live with it.

And, the last thing maybe, is to make really sure that no one is left behind. I don't mean only by the skills, but also that we cannot have AI if we don't have data. So when we are collecting data, we were speaking about the biases, it doesn't start with the AI, with the technology, with the algorithms, but it starts with the data. It is really important how the data is collected, who is preparing the model, who is designing the algorithms and so on and so on. So not only when we are teaching AI, but also everybody that is involved throughout the process, we need to involve everyone.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Thank you Minister. Minister Al Falasi, let's continue talking about best practices and lessons that you've learned, as the UAE, when it comes to artificial intelligence and the intersection with education.

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates: Well, look, I'm not going into the details. I think Jeff Tarr and the Minister covered many topics. One of the key learnings, at least for me, is that when we talk about adopting technologies like AI it sounds fancy and interesting, but the public talks about the basics. They say, look, our numeracy and literacy is so low, why are you talking about AI? You know? So there is this, I think communication needs to be made that we're using these tools to play catch up.

We came to formal education very late. My country is as old as this Forum, 1971. So you can understand how much time we need to really catch up. So that's why I think part of it is explaining to the public, one we really are investing in AI in education and two, for the teachers themselves, we spoke about the limitation or the scarcity of teachers, the last thing I want is to give them this perceived risk of losing their jobs and being replaced. We want to empower them. And this is why when we started with the AI tutor it was outside the class, so they don't feel that they are a threat.

Now, what's interesting is that we've got teachers now talking to us, saying, can we get access to a teaching assistant? If today this AI tutor is interacting with the students and understanding at what level are they, I would love to get this information to be in the form of a teaching assistant. So it was more of a pull as opposed to a push specifically with education because I think being an educator, naturally, you're perceived as knowing it all, I'll tell you how to learn, I'll teach you nobody questions. How is it being taught? Right.

We talk about reskilling. I don't see reskilling a lot when it comes to educators. Yes, we retrain them on the curriculum, but reskilling is a concept that I think we need to really focus on when it comes to educators. In an ideal world, I would love to have technology assist teachers teaching students the basic numeracy and literacy and then leave the most difficult part the soft skills, the human skills, you know, to be really doubled down by teachers. We need to free up their time to focus on skills that will matter for humanity and going forward. I don't want to sound idealistic, but we're getting there step by step.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Okay, this is a conversation that I'd like to move onto the floor. Now, if anybody has a question, please ask that you raise your hand, let us know where you're from and who your question is. I'd like to get as many questions as possible. So, fewer comments if possible. There's a gentleman in the fourth row and there's a gentleman in the first row we can start with. Thank you.

Audience member: Good morning. Thank you very much. My name is John. I'm with the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers and I'm an educator in Zimbabwe with Star Leadership Academy. My question is, as the world stands, there's already inequality when it comes to education. How do we ensure that as we continue to implement AI into education, no child is left behind and we carry each and every child within the process? Thank you.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Sure we can take it.

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates:
I think that's a great question. Technology makes education scalable, right. So I think that's one way where we can actually ensure that whether it's a good teacher teaching online or a tutor, this kind of technologies, I think will really help us scale up. And I think with Africa, the challenge is, like any other country, any other continent, the scarcity of teachers. So I think that will help us to some extent address that gap from my perspective.

We've seen that happen in energy right? So, there might be countries in Africa where the grid system is not proliferated, but to use renewables to have, you know, isolated power sources through solar and wind and so forth. In a similar way, education could also be used to really, reach every student and not leave anyone behind.

A point to be made, on specifically tutoring, a private tutor would cost you a specific amount, we have the numbers in the UAE. The AI tutor would be a fraction of that. So even if we were to charge commercially, it will also be much more affordable. And I think governments could also invest in that to make sure that we really uplift everyone and not leave anybody behind. Thank you.

Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Minister of Digital Transformation, Slovenia:
Can I add something? I also believe this is an excellent question. What we promote in Slovenia is access to the internet, because access to the internet is access to information and knowledge. So nowadays, and there is information as well, but let's keep to the knowledge. So before, when I was young, I couldn't imagine following a lesson from Stanford or from Harvard or, I don't know, name it, different universities throughout the world. All you need now is access to the internet. Many of these courses of these trainings are available for free or even for some little fee, but you can start there. So I believe that access to the internet should be a human right, because then we can address the inequalities in skills, in the access to skills and knowledge as well.

Jeffrey Tarr, Skillsoft: I mean, can I add to that? We're working with an incredible organisation. I Am The Code, which is teaching, mostly young women and girls, but now boys, in some of the most disadvantaged parts of the world. Refugee camps, the refugee camp in Kakuma in Kenya. And the access is a big issue and it's the devices. There's a tremendous shortage of devices. And if you go there or you see pictures of it or video, you see there's groups of children gathered around one device. So anyone who can unlock and solve that problem can have a huge impact on the world.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Right, we've got a second question in the front row.

Audience member: Hello. Good morning everyone. My name is Pranav Kothari, CEO of Ei Mindspark, an adaptive learning software. What we are seeing in school grades K2 is that, you know, what are the best methodologies to learn algebra or magnetism? Hasn't quite got enough research grounding. So for example, we know how to make steel. You followed the template 99 out of 100 times you will sort of make steel of the desired quality. But any educator today, when they walk into an eighth-grade classroom and are tasked with teaching linear equations or electricity, do not have access to a codified science of education in terms of what can they do so that by the end of the class, more than 80 students would have mastered this? Right.

So this requires investments in doing R&D, much like how the medical world has done it, to come up with medicines to certain diseases. But this is not getting any area of focus, this pedagogy. Right. So we've talked about technology. We've talked about inclusion, but those are only things to accelerate once we know how to sort of make sure children master those learning outcomes. So what are ministries doing in terms of, you know, their universities having a science of learning department? As well as when you make courses, you know, how much attention is being paid to pedagogy to make sure that the end of the course students learn it, because only otherwise the highly motivated adults benefit from it?

Hadi Partovi, Code.org: I can take a shot at answering that question. The promise of using AI and technology in education is offering personalized learning for every student. No matter how much learning science you look into, one teacher with a classroom of 30 students is not going to be able to deal with different learning abilities, different learning methodologies and serve different things to all 30 students at the same time. But if they have individualized AI tutors, those AI tutors can give one student one method, a different student, a different method. And in fact, we're actually working with Stanford Research, on doing exactly this, taking advantage of the latest in learning science to figure out how to personalize and adapt learning to individual student's learning progression.

And that really is only going to be possible using AI, being part of the equation as a tutor. And, this is not something that's available in the mass market today, but it is something that you can expect AI is going to bring to education. But the other thing I would want to add is that when we think about embracing new technology in education, most people think about improving how we teach, but they think about the same subjects they learned when they were young. You know, I learned biology and algebra and chemistry and history. What we don't think about is that our schools should be teaching computer science and AI and cybersecurity and robotics. None of us learn these things or almost none of us learn these things when we were going through middle school and high school.

And so we're teaching the curriculum of 50 years ago and not recognizing that the world has changed incredibly in the last 50 years. So in addition to using AI and learning science to improve education outcomes for the curriculum of the past, we should, like the countries here, be modernizing our curriculum to teach the curriculum of the future. And, by the way, I want to say you were saying you're playing catch up because your country is new and, you know, the countries represented here are younger countries. Younger countries have a huge advantage because they don't have a 200-year-old education system that is stuck in the past. Everything in your education system was invented recently.

So you're very comfortable being like, well, now we need to improve on it. Whereas in the older countries, nothing has changed in the education system. Nobody alive has actually modified the curriculum recently. So they feel like you can't even touch this thing. It's sort of set in stone from the 1800s. And so you actually have a huge advantage that are among the countries that are at the forefront of embracing AI and changing the curriculum.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: I wonder if you can respond?

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates: Yeah. So I think that's a very, very good question. I think the pedagogical practices could benefit from more research. I have twins, a boy and a girl and I still teach them and they learn so differently. My girl is very visual, so I have to explain that visually, and my son is very analytical. I have to give him equations. So I've seen first-hand how two siblings learn completely differently.

The more you interact and the more the technology understands your style, it should adapt the way of teaching. It's not only personal in terms of what content understanding, if you're trying to learn calculus, maybe you still have gaps in the linear equations. That's fine, but how do I teach you? I think there is a lot of room to invest in that. Right now we're going into the basic design to at least get data and see where our students, you know are sitting. If you look at the OECD results, we're about a year or two behind in some areas of numeracy and literacy? That to me is a big issue.

The bigger issue right now is now you know where the student is at, you have a map of them, but how would you teach each student differently? And again, to the point about scarcity of teachers, you talk about 30 kids in the classroom that might increase to 35, which makes the task of the teacher much more difficult. So, I agree with you, and I think we really need to double down on that, because every person learns differently.

Jeffrey Tarr, Skillsoft: The outcomes are so important. Measuring the outcomes. And in my world, there's no excuse to not deliver outcomes, we have to because companies are paying for it. And so they want to see ROI and to show ROI, you have to show outcomes and to deliver outcomes. You have to have thoughtful pedagogy. You have to have research.

Audience member: Hi, my name is Krista Kim and I am a cultural leader this year. I'll stand up. Hi, we're talking about trust and I'm wondering how blockchain decentralized ledger technology with verified sort of authorship of data and education. If you've paid attention to this, because I find that we need to have, you know, a layer of trust using blockchain technology that can prove who wrote the data, the information, the articles that are educating our children and our children are getting a lot of information online, YouTube, you know, just on the internet. We need to know the sources.

Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Minister of Digital Transformation, Slovenia:
I cannot agree more with you. And it's not only in primary education, but it's also later on in higher education when we are writing different scientific papers. So who wrote the paper? Who reviewed the paper, who was the editor? And so on and so on. So, definitely, blockchain technologies here can increase trust. But again, the problem is, as you mentioned, how public understands, the public doesn't understand what blockchain is. So, they need the digital skills to understand what decentralized blockchain and systems are, where this data is coming from and so on and so on. So this is also why I mentioned that the beginning, one of our top priorities is that we increase at least the basic digital skills because then people will understand how technologies can help them.

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates: If I may, I think, it is a very valid point in terms of the authenticity of the data, but there's a whole separate realm, more that comes in handy, which is IP rights. Today I'm using a tutor that uses curriculum or any resource, that person has a copyright on that material. So I think also blockchain might help us in terms of ensuring that whatever resource we use to identify not only who the author is in terms of trustworthiness or not, but also the eligibility for copyright on the material, because it's very easy to tap into materials today, you have access to everything, but there's also IP rights as well involved. I think blockchain could help that as well.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Right. We have about eight minutes left and I'd like to take as many questions as possible. There were two questions in the front here and there was one question, in the second row, please ask the mics to be taken there.

Audience member: My name is Eileen, and I'm from Indonesia. I would like to ask about how AI in the future can help special needs students?

Jeffrey Tarr, Skillsoft: Well, certainly, AI, as we've talked about the personalized tutor or personalized coach, personalized engagement, when it's personalized and adaptive, we can help a much wider range of learning abilities, both in children and in adults.

Hadi Partovi, Code.org: With special needs teachers, one of the hardest things in their lives is actually creating individualized education programmes for special needs students. Just writing the IEP for that student is a huge amount of a teacher's time. One of the earliest ways I can help save time for teachers is for the AI to assist in creating that IEP for the students.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Okay, so can we take the question from the left of the room and then we'll come back to the right of the room here. Please, go ahead with your question.

Audience member: Well, thank you for all your perspectives. It's really interesting to hear the different points of view. I live in the United States and it's not that they don't want to touch the education curriculum, but it's that the United States is not investing in education, it's at the bottom? So in order to bring all the points that you're saying and talk about AI and bring all that curriculum, there needs to be more investment. The teachers are open, but they're strained because in the inner cities you're dealing with a lot of poverty, students that are hungry, that don't have parents, that are homeless and the teachers are dealing with that. There are not enough counsellors, not enough, psychological help for them. And the teachers are dealing with that. Teachers are quitting. So a lot of the schools in the inner cities don't have enough teachers. So it's really a question of investing. And then you can, it's almost like a luxury to invest in AI and technologies. The young people don't have the devices or the internet connection. So thank you.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Thank you for your comment.

Hadi Partovi, Code.org: I'm happy to respond. I mean, I live in the United States as well and actually 50% of our work is in the US. There's a number of comments. I'd say, first of all, in terms of device access, the US is far ahead of most of the world and even the OECD in terms of device access. This is like the one silver lining of the Covid pandemic, federal funding increased one-on-one device access in the US from about 50% of students to 93% of students, which is way ahead of most OECD countries and certainly far ahead of countries like Africa. So in terms of that, we're actually in a really good place.

Hadi Partovi, Code.org: The U.S. is leading the world in one-to-one device access, unlike some of the larger economies. But, in terms of investing in education, absolutely the teacher shortage, regardless of investment, is also going to be a challenge, not only in the US, but in many other countries. But I believe AI has an opportunity to assist with that, because part of the challenges with the teacher shortage in the United States and in every country is teachers are overworked, they get paid for a 9-to-5 job, but they're also working at night preparing the lesson plan or grading the homework after school has closed.

And AI can actually reduce the amount of time teachers need to spend on basically paperwork outside the classroom so they can spend more time one-on-one with students, which is why most teachers joined the teaching workforce in the first place. So the promise of AI is reducing the paperwork and administrative workload of a teacher, enabling that teacher to actually do a better job on the thing that they wants to do, which is helping students. And I think that's a win-win for everybody. And that's true in the United States and in other countries as well.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Thank you so much. I'm going to ask to pause there. I think this is a great conversation that can carry on maybe outside of the room as well. I'd like to take as many questions as possible. I'll ask for questions in the second row..

Audience member: Thank you very much for the discussion. I'm a parliament member in Switzerland, and I have a question. I think one of the problems is misinformation and disinformation, and AI will further the problem even more than social media did the last years. And don't you think that the basic skills would be to teach the student about critical thinking? It's how to research, analyse, evaluate the information and know how to use it. AI is a tool, but what it gets out of this tool has to be critically evaluated. Don't you think that teachers have to teach precisely that to students?

Dr Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Minister of Digital Transformation, Slovenia: I cannot agree more with you. I sign under every word you mention 100%. Yes. So critical thinking, thinking out of the box, information literacy, media literacy. Definitely. But we come back to the same challenge. How do you teach critical thinking?

You made a very good point. I don't know. I'm electrical engineer. It's very straightforward. You have a recipe how to teach, how current works and so on and so on. How do you teach critical thinking and if teachers don't have those skills, how they can then teach the students?

Dr Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of Education, United Arab Emirates: I want just to follow up on that. I think that's a great question. When ChatGPT was first introduced in November, there was hysteria in academia, specifically at universities, there was a banning of AI. But then when they said, let's ensure that our students use ChatGPT and any other large language model, if you force them to use it and they come back to class, you then challenge them on what they have read. That's the best way where they achieve two things. One is they would learn how to use that technology because when they graduate, they will use it on a daily basis. And secondly, if they use it to retrieve information, you ask them to challenge that and to present it. So that's you hitting two birds with one stone adopting it, and two critically challenging whatever outcome comes out of it.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: All right, we have less than three minutes left on the panel. I don't know if the last question is going to take 30 seconds or less and the answer is going to take the same time.

Audience member: I'll just make quick comment. We've been working with young people, on critical thinking, future skills, soft skills for the last 20 years and there's two things I just wanted to add on the question of devices. One of the things that I think is an assumption that people have is that the end user has to have connectivity, devices, broadband. And what we've been experimenting with is using AI to nanotyse the learning and feed it in to individual students via SMS, even, you know, Raspberry Pi's, all kinds of things.

So you don't actually have to have full bandwidth and everything else at the end to take advantage of the personalization of AI. And also the other bit is the AI tools that we've been building probe the personality and preferences of young people. So if a student is interested in soccer or cricket or whatever the course, the examples are personalized to increase their motivation.

Nzinga Qunta, SABC: Thank you so much for your intervention. I'm not going to ask for a response. I'm just going to wrap up what I think are some of the key takeaways from the panel that we've had today. I think the biggest one is that learning is not confined to a classroom or an age at whatever age, whether you're in school, university, retired or in between, learning can still happen and it's not limited to the classroom. It's not limited to a physical space, and the data is so important, what's being inputted,

Avoiding bias, making sure that the mistakes that we've made up until this point, when it comes to bias, whether it's gender, race or other, is avoided. And finally, the importance of critical information and critical thinking. I would just like to thank our panellists so much for their contributions. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much to the people in the room for your incredible insight and questions. It's really appreciated. It's been a pleasure being your moderator. Good morning.