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Education and Information Technologies

The Official Journal of the IFIP Technical Committee on Education

Publishing model:
Hybrid

Education and Information Technologies - Call for Papers: Special Issue on Applications of Generative Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Education

Guest editors

  • Monique Grandbastien, Université de Lorraine, France, 
  • Andrea Horbach, Hildesheim University, Germany
  • Tanya Linden, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Thorben Jansen, Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Germany

Motivation

The amount of hype generated by the public availability of ChatGPT in November 2022 has massively popularized generative AI technologies. Since this event, not a week goes by without new applications in various fields, including education, being proposed, which fascinate or worry everyone, a feeling exemplified by headings such as “AI invades us” or “AI could replace equivalent of 300 million jobs”! OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT is seen as a disruptive technology.

However, computer science has a successful history of implementing many disruptions (personal computers, internet, World Wide Web, social networks, etc.). Within computer science, Artificial Intelligence has brought significant breaks too. The underlying technology of deep learning combined with the increasing available computing power led to unprecedented applications for analyzing and generating sounds, images, texts, videos.

For conversational agents, deep learning has been used to train large language models (LLMs). Larger and larger language models, such as the GPT family (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) based on larger and larger datasets appeared during the 2010-2020 decade and immediately brought their share of immense hopes and also of concerns as well as potential dangers.

All those technologies are getting mature, sometimes earlier than expected, and bring many changes in most domains of our everyday lives. They are heavily impacting the education sector and they need a rapid and massive response from educators at different levels, especially for retraining in service teachers and also for a complete reshaping of many curricula.

Research questions and expected contributions

For this special issue, we consider “generative AI technologies” as software applications, usually relying on deep learning principles, that can be used to create new content such as sounds, images, texts, videos and their combinations.

The “ChatGPT” conversational agent was publicly launched in November 2022 by OpenAI, but other applications based on large language models and other techniques were available for research and experimentations several years earlier. Putting together and spreading the results of such experimentations in education would be helpful for the educational community.

Applications of generative technologies to education are diverse and can be described through several viewpoints: Stakeholders, employment sector, ethical issues. Expected contributions include the following, but as we write this call for papers new applications appear in new contexts, so works illustrating other points of view are also welcome:

  • helpful tools for teachers, such as MCQ generators that simplify their daily tasks and save more time for direct interaction with students
  • changing teachers’ and institutions’ evaluation practices to avoid possible cheating and plagiarism
  • personalized advice and follow up for students, new tools available for helping them in solving many problems
  • new policies design by institutions, including new diploma architectures
  • applications dedicated to parents
  • new curricula adapted in terms of content as well as in ways of teaching and learning


From an ethical viewpoint,

  • how to deal with potential “fakes” everywhere
  • would educators and parents accept the use of core tools applications if their underlying principles are not made public?
  • would educators and parents accept new tools if their training needs a computing power that only a handful of private world corporations can afford and that needs huge amounts of energy?
  • How does generative artificial intelligence affect progress towards the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 4 (this opens in a new tab), on ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all? 

Submitted papers must be suitable for EAIT journal readership which is composed of researchers and practitioners in education technologies. So, papers should describe either experiences including real students, teachers, teacher trainers, educators or describe technologies that are mature but not yet used in real classes. In this second case, papers should be appealing for the global EAIT readership, i.e., papers should be understandable to a non-technical audience and should not simply describe a technical solution but also discuss its impact on education. Given the novelty of some of these technologies, research in progress could also be considered. Considering the huge need of teacher training and retraining, teaching tips are also encouraged which provide proven applications of the technologies in the classroom. Different from traditional pedagogical research, teaching tips likely do not have an experimental design or a heavy theoretical background, however, they adequately describe the context and approach through which the technology was used and/or taught and provide support for the effectiveness of the pedagogical approach.

Timeline

  • Submission deadline: extended to 1 March 2024 1 December 2023
  • Notification of first review results: June 2024
  • Revised versions due: September 2024
  • Final acceptance notification by: November 2024


Submission Guidelines

Please submit via EAIT Editorial Manager: www.editorialmanager.com/ (this opens in a new tab)eait (this opens in a new tab)

Choose SI: Generative Artificial Intelligence Technologies from the Article Type dropdown.

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Special Issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least two independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process. Manuscripts will be subject to a peer reviewing process and must conform to the author guide lines available on the EAIT website at:  https://www.springer.com/ (this opens in a new tab)10639 (this opens in a new tab)
 

Author Resources
Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by other journals.  Springer provides a host of information about publishing in a Springer Journal on our Journal Author Resources page (this opens in a new tab), including  FAQs (this opens in a new tab),  Tutorials  (this opens in a new tab)along with Help and Support (this opens in a new tab). 

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