The Learning from the Extremes project organised a Webinar to familiarize teachers with Artificial Intelligence technologies and introduce them to current applications of AI, which can serve teaching and learning objectives.
In the first part of the webinar, the researchers presented conversational AI technologies and their applications in education, with short talks, examples, discussions and demonstrations of applications, such as ChatGPT.
In the second part, teachers had the opportunity to use an AI-powered dialog system for text interaction (chatbot) in activities related to various school subjects. As part of these activities, they interacted with the chatbot, asking questions about different topics and asking it to perform various tasks related to the educational process, such as providing information on a topic, proposing comprehension questions, preparing a lesson plan etc.
At the end of the webinar, teachers were asked to fill in a questionnaire, in which they evaluated their experience of using the chatbot, in terms of its performance, usability, and its ability to support teaching objectives, while they will propose scenarios for its use in the educational practice, according to their needs.
The webinar was part of the research activities of the Erasmus+ project AI4EDU: Conversational AI assistant for teaching and learning (website: https://stage.ai4edu.eu/) and aimed to contribute to the acceptance of AI systems as teaching and learning companions and to the awareness of the human role in the development, use and improvement of AI applications.
Speakers:
Vassilis Katsouros, Researcher, Director of the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center
Pepi Stamouli, Research Associate, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center