In November 2023, i was greatly privileged to be invited as a panelist at Empowering Minds: A Round Table on Generative AI and Education in Asia-Pacific. My hosts were the UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office in Bangkok (UNESCO Bangkok), in collaboration with The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO).

The overarching purpose of this Experts Round Table was to inform and guide the transformation of education systems in the Asia-Pacific region by:

• exploring implications for responsible and ethical integration of generative AI in teaching and learning, with a focus on ChatGPT and other emerging technologies; and

• enhancing the capacities of educators to utilize AI competencies in teaching and learning at the school level, optimizing potential benefits and minimizing risks.

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By fostering dialogue, knowledge exchange, and collaboration among diverse stakeholders, the Experts Round Table aimed to facilitate the responsible and equitable adoption of AI-driven teaching and learning in the region.

During the Round Table, i shared how we see the potential of Generative AI in nurturing learner empathy, prosocial values and environmental stewardship.

I tried to contribute by first sharing how institutional policy regarding generative AI might be interpreted and enacted within the context of a tertiary course in Data Science and the Internet of Things, and second as a Co-Principal Investigator of a grant on the use of Generative AI in academic writing awarded under the auspices of the Presidents’ Forum of Southeast and South Asia and Taiwan Universities (SATU) Joint Research Scheme.

The latter was awarded in collaboration with faculty from the University of Malaya, themed on The role of Artificial Intelligence in aiding learning and development of academic writing skills.

Since January 2023 my team and I have been conducting seminars on Generative AI. A primary aim of these seminars is to help students better understand how Generative AI operates (for example in terms of training biases), in order to enable them to critically analyse stated claims about such models and to actively advocate for their own interests (such as defending their data privacy).

In terms of empowering educators and learners with skills and competency to integrate Generative AI in teaching and learning, my team and I were awarded a grant to build capacity among lecturers and their students at the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), Singapore, through the development and use of a Generative AI-based tool for providing timely feedback to students who are learning to code. 

This project Helping students learn coding with automatic feedback and analytics was subsequently chosen as an ‘AI in Education’ Showcase at the Research Symposium, Centre for Information Technology in Education, at The University of Hong Kong in May 2023.

As for the specificities of the project, its aim is to meet the learning needs of students taking a foundational coding module at the ITE by providing them with context-specific feedback to guide them the process of improving and debugging their code. 

The project team initially explored other machine learning methods to classify and detect errors in code, but moved on to the use of Generative AI – Large Language Models – once we saw the potential for analysing code without the need to extensively train them to address new problem sets. This, coupled with the rapid improvements in the accuracy of leading models in code analysis tasks from 2022 onwards, made it clear that the Generative AI approach was feasible and also scalable.