Towards Inclusive Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities

In the West and other parts of the world, the ideal of an individualised, personalised education system has become ever more influential in recent times. Over the last 30 years, research has shown how effective, individually tailored approaches can be achieved using artificial intelligence techniques and intelligent learning environments (ILE). As new audiences of learners are exposed daily to ILEs through mobile devices and ubiquitous Internet access, significantly different challenges to the original goal of personalised instruction are presented. In particular, learners have cultural backgrounds and preferences that may not align with most mainstream educational systems. When faced with practical cultural issues, the transfer of successful research and ILEs to underserved contexts has been naturally quite low. This chapter first takes a step back and analyses perspectives on how intelligent learning environments have transitioned from focusing on instructional rigour to focusing more deeply on the learner. Next, it examines some major challenges faced when ILEs aim to integrate culturally sensitive design features. The chapter then discusses several opportunities for dealing with these challenges from novel perspectives such as teacher modelling, the use of educational robots and empathic systems and highlights important concerns such as machine ethics.