International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education - Call for Papers: Special Issue on AIED in the Global South

Guest editors

Ig Ibert Bittencourt (Federal University of Alagoas; Brazil; Harvard Graduate School of Education, US)
Maria Mercedes Rodrigo (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines)
Yu Lu (Beijing Normal University, China)
Cesar Collazos (Universidad del Cauca, Colombia) ·
Diego Dermeval (Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil)
Paul Prinsloo (University of South Africa, South Africa)
Seiji Isotani (Harvard Graduate School of Education, US)

Since the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the expansion of educational opportunity globally has been spectacular (Carney, 2022), on which humanity moved from 45% of access to Education in 1948 to 95% in 2022. Although the Global Educational Movement has progressed to promote the expansion of educational opportunities, the challenge we face nowadays is also manifold, such as quality of education (Schleicher, 2018), the well-being of students and teachers (Bai et al., 2021), availability of technological and educational resources (Reimers et al., 2021), lack of digital capabilities of the teachers (Tal, 2019), and so on. We are not only living in an unequal educational system, but the learning poverty (Bank, 2022) and inequality are increasing in the last decade and deepen during the Covid-19 pandemic (Reimers et al., 2022; Reimers, 2022).

The situation is even more dramatic when we talk about the Global South, which has most of the low-middle-income countries in the world. The challenges in Global South Education involve (Carney, 2022): a high number of
nonliterate people, a high number of students still in primary education, a high number of adolescents and youths out of secondary school, a high gender gap, and so on. The digital divide is one of the challenges that is deepening even more the inequality between the Global South and Global North. Digital Divide implies worldwide explosive growth of the Internet, but data has shown it is an uneven, multidimensional phenomenon (Calzada & Cobo, 2015). Indeed, technological innovations have transformed different sectors of the economy, promoting more development and embedding value in the chain worldwide by facilitating collective action in the direction of peace, justice, and sustainability.

Some would also argue that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies can support the global movement to achieve the civilisational goals of the 2030 agenda (Vinuesa et al., 2020). However, a recent study on Nature Communications about the role of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals varies according to each goal. The bad news is that SDG4: Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, is one of the goals with more negative impacts on the use of AI, indicating that 70% of the targets were affected/inhibited by AI (Vinuesa et al., 2020). Such challenges are not exclusive to AIED but to digital technologies in education as a whole. Although ICTs helped to reshape the ways we live and learn, due to the digital divide, it has been just another layer of promoting inequality in education. Therefore, digital divides persist in internet access and the skills and competencies needed to leverage technology for collective and personal aims (Carney, 2022).

We are in an Educational Crisis. Nevertheless, there are several advances promoted by digital technologies and AIED. Digital technologies helped humanity respond quickly to the Covid-19 pandemic and provide remote learning to billions of students worldwide (Reimers, 2021). For several months, 1.7 billion students had no access to education, and digital technologies were used as the main strategy in all countries, even in the Global South. Additionally, there are recent studies and reports discussing and presenting the benefits of Artificial Intelligence to promote education in the Global South, such as AI Literacy (Miao, 2022; Madaio et al., 2020), AI for public policies and policymakers (Miao et al., 2021), Ethics of AIED (Holmes et al., 2021; Schiff, 2021), AI applied to effective learning (Oyelere et al., 2022; Joaquim et al., 2021; Uchidiuno et al., 2017), AI to support teachers (Paiva & Bittencourt, 2020; Baker, 2016), Improving management of schools with AI (Miao et al., 2021), and so on. Although the outstanding results of past experiences, the advances of AIED applied to address Global South challenges are still in its infancy.

For this reason, new research needs to shed light on the role of Artificial Intelligence in Education to promote equity and advance the civilisational goals of the 2030 agenda. The special issue aims to answer three questions:

1. How has AIED impacted Sustainable Development Goal 4 and its targets?
2. How and where the research on AIED has been applied in the Global
South?
3. How can AIED be applied to schools and regions with vulnerable conditions?

This Special Issue will seek research contributions addressing these and other research challenges related to AIED in the Global South to advance the civilisational goals of the 2030 agenda. We invite primary, secondary and opinion papers to contribute to this call.

List of Topics
The themes of this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

Barriers to and opportunities for the adoption of AIED in the Global South;
Adaptive and Intelligent Tutoring Systems in the Global South;
AIED and teacher education for the Global South;
Real-world applications and practical experiences of AIED systems in the Global South;
AIED promoting Sustainable Development Goals for the Global South;
Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics of AIED in the Global South;
Evaluation of AIED systems in the Global South context;
Artificial Intelligence promoting the well-being of students and teachers in the Global South;
AIED applied to public policy in the Global South;
AIED for management and curriculum integration in the Global South;
AIED Education in the Global South;
K-12 AI Curricula in the Global South;
AIED and extreme events (e.g., natural catastrophes, war, endemics, pandemics);
AIED and Digital Divide;
AIED studies which the subjects of researchers are from the Global South.

Authors who are unsure about submitting their work to this special issue,
can contact the Guest Editors by email with an abstract (300 words) or
extended abstract (up to 800 words).

Timeline
This Special Issue will start reviewing papers as soon as they are received.
Nevertheless, the main deadlines are as follows:

Full paper submission: September 15, 2023 extended to October 16, 2023
Authors’ notification: November 15, 2023 December 16, 2023
Authors’ rebuttal deadline: December 15, 2023 January 19, 2023
Final notification: January 31, 2024 February 28, 2023
Camera-ready versions: February 29, 2024 March 21, 2023

Submission Guidelines
Please submit via IJAIED Editorial Manager: www.editorialmanager.com/aied
Choose SI: AIED in the Global South under "Additional Information."

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 three 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 IJAIED website at: https://www.springer.com/40593. (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 (this opens in a new tab) page, 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).

Other links include:

Guest Editors

– Seiji Isotani is a Visiting Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Professor of Computer Science and Learning Technology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. For the past 15+ years, Prof. Isotani has dedicated his research career to advancing the science concerning how people learn with interactive/intelligent educational technologies. He also works to transform research findings into social impact through the conception of educational practices, technologies, and policies that accelerate the benefits and adoption of evidence-based approaches in Brazilian education, as well as in other Global South countries or places with similar conditions. He is often recognized for his work in Gamification in Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). Since 2017, he works as a technical/scientific advisor to the Brazilian Ministry of Education in the designing and implementation of public policies related to educational technologies.

– Ig Ibert Bittencourt is an Associate Professor at Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil), and a Visiting Research at Harvard Graduate School of Education (USA). He is the Co-Founder of the Center of Excellence for Social Technologies (NEES). His research career has been dedicated to Education, working on the design, development and experimentation of educational technologies to promote learning and well-being. He is doing interdisciplinary research using computational solutions and psychological theories to provide a better learning experience. Additionally, since 2015 Prof. Ig has been involved with public policies in education and in the main Brazilian initiatives of the movement to implement Blended Learning across the country.

– C´esar A. Collazos, Full Professor, Universidad del Cauca-Colombia. Head IDIS Research Group, Universidad del Cauca-Colombia. Coordinator of HCI-Collab (www.hci-collab.com): Collaborative Network supporting Human Computer Interaction education in Iberoamerica (LatinaAmerica, Spain, Portugal), Visiting professor, Universidad de LleidaSpain, 2006., Visiting Professor, Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica de Valpara´ıso, Chile, 2009. Visiting Professor, Universidad Nacional de San Juan (Argentina), 2010. Visiting Professor, Universidad Tecnol´ogica de Panam´a, 2011. This year received the Martin Wolpers Award to excellence in research, education and a significant impact in the society. Areas of interest: Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.

– Maria Mercedes (Didith) T. Rodrigo is a professor at the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Her research interests include learning analytics, artificial intelligence in education, and technology in education. She is the head of the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences. In 2008, she was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. She has served as local organizer and International Program Coordination Chair of the International Conference in Computers in Education 2018 and 2021 respectively. Most recently, she was program co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference 2022. In 2021, Dr. Rodrigo received the Distinguished Researcher Award from the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) and is the President-elect of APSCE.

– Diego Dermeval is an Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Alagoas. He received his Ph.D. from the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG - Brazil) with a sandwich period at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S - Canada). He has been dedicated to research in Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), working on intelligent educational technologies’ design, development, and experimentation. Diego is the author/co-author of over 50 articles published in journals or conferences in Artificial Intelligence in Education and has published in reputable venues in these areas (e.g., IJAIED and AIED). He is the Center for Excellence in Social Technologies (NEES) vice-director. NEES’ mission is to transform people’s lives by increasing the opportunities and quality of learning by promoting evidence-based digital transformation. In the context of NEES, Diego Dermeval is currently a consultant to the Ministry of Education of Brazil in the implementation of evidence-informed public policies in Education.

– Lu Yu received the Ph.D. degree from National University of Singapore in computer engineering. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Educational Technology, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University (BNU), where he also serves as the director of the artificial intelligence lab at the advanced innovation center for future education (AICFE). He has published more than 70 academic papers in the prestigious journals and conferences (e.g., IJAIED, IEEE TLT, TKDE, TON, TMC, ICDM, AAAI), and currently serves as the PC member or track chair for multiple international conferences (e.g., AIED, EDM, EMNLP, WSDM, AAAI). Before joining BNU, he was a research scientist and principle investigator at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore. His current research interests mainly lie at the intersection field of artificial intelligence and education.

– Paul Prinsloo is a Research Professor in Open and Distance Learning (ODL) in the College of Economic and Management Sciences, University of South Africa (Unisa). Since 2015 he is also a Visiting Professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. His academic background includes fields as diverse as theology, art history, business management, online learning, and religious studies. Paul is an established researcher and has published numerous articles in the fields of teaching and learning, student success in distance education contexts, learning analytics, postgraduate supervision and curriculum development. His current research focuses on the collection, analysis and use of student data in learning analytics, graduate supervision and digital identities.

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International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education - Call for Papers: Special Issue on AIED in the Global South

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