our team is deeply humbled to be presented with the opportunity to share our work on the affordances of Generative AI for meaningful teaching and learning, during UNESCO’s first annual flagship event Digital Learning Week, international forum on the implications of Generative AI for education, session on ‘Preparing students and teachers for responsible use of AI’, later this year in Paris.
The Digital Learning Week is the rebranding of the decade-long UNESCO Mobile Learning Week and will serve as the new UNESCO annual flagship event on digital learning to steer the human-centred digital transformation of education. It aims to convene in-person events to reassemble the global community of policy-makers, practitioners, educators, private sector partners, researchers and development agencies to jointly respond to the new dynamic around digital learning.
Digital Learning Week 2023 will leverage the global momentum surrounding digital learning, stemming from the 2022 Transforming Education Summit and recent breakthroughs in generative AI.
The Digital Learning Week 2023 will stage a two-day international symposium on digital learning platforms and a two-day high-level international forum on AI and education with a specific focus on the implications of generative AI for education.
To surface best practices and facilitate knowledge sharing, UNESCO is focusing on regulations or policies that have been adopted and released, projects that have been implemented at scale, or platforms or AI tools that have been developed and put in use. The selection of proposals was highly competitive as fewer than fifty submissions were retained from more than 200 proposals received.
our session is titled Exploring the affordances of generative AI for meaningful teaching and learning in Singapore tertiary education.
its abstract reads:
This presentation will showcase ongoing research work exploring the use of generative AI tools in tertiary education in Singapore. This work aims to distill principles for designing AI-enabled pedagogical strategies which lead to positive learning outcomes (supporting UN’s SDG 4 in particular), while avoiding and minimising negative outcomes. Such work is both timely and crucial given the rapid spread of generative AI tools in society. Currently, few educational institutions have developed policies or guidelines regarding the use of generative AI (a recent UNESCO global of survey of 450 schools found that fewer than 10% had done so), and many of the initial responses centred on mitigating damage from issues such as AI-enabled cheating and plagiarism. The possibilities of new approaches to teaching and learning which may be afforded by these tools remains under-explored. This presentation will feature two case studies from ongoing research at Singapore tertiary institutions. The first focuses on the use of a custom large language model (LLM)-based tool to provide novice coding students at a vocational tertiary college with timely feedback and advice on their code. This study seeks to address an existing issue which instructors had identified: that many of their students struggled to make progress in coding assignments with just the feedback and guidance provided during classes. The second focuses on the use of LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Bard, in tertiary-level humanities courses for ideation, brainstorming and facilitating creative thinking and reflection on students’ own work. This approach aims to guide students towards using LLMs to aid their critical thinking process (rather than shortcutting it) and to help them understand the affordances and limitations of LLMs. As both studies are currently ongoing, preliminary results including feedback from students and lecturers will be presented, along with some discussion on future plans.
we acknowledge this blessing and privilege is from God, to Whom we give thanks and praise.

(image copyright Lily Chavance; courtesy of UNESCO)