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AI Principles

Our goal is to support teachers and help every student reach their potential. While we understand the potential benefits of AI tools,  we also uphold the responsibility of safeguarding your data.  So, whenever we think about adding new features, we make sure to focus on keeping your data safe, especially when it comes to AI.

The Sanoma group (including itslearning) have proactively implemented a structured governance process for the use of AI. This means that all our AI developments go through an evaluation process at the design stage, to ensure that the user benefits of AI are considered alongside ethical and privacy considerations. 

 

AI in itslearning

AI will never replace the unique expertise, knowledge, or creative spark of an educator. Instead, it can serve as a powerful ally, ready to amplify and enrich both teaching and learning experiences. 

Our team is exploring the integration of generative AI into our Learning Management System (LMS), with an initial emphasis on assisting educators in content creation and streamlining their workflows. While we are excited about the potential of generative AI, we prioritise the importance of educators maintaining control as the final 'editor' and 'approver' of any content before it reaches students.

All our AI developments go through an evaluation process at the design stage. Here we consider:

  • Ethics and guidelines (internal, external)
  • The AI Act
  • User-centric design principles
  • A privacy impact assessment

This ensures the user benefits of any AI are considered alongside ethical and data privacy considerations. This is part of our review process before any new feature can be moved forward for development.

 
How do we use AI today?

In our development environments, we're actively testing AI technologies to attain specific objectives. Nonetheless, safeguarding teacher/student data and ensuring strict compliance with GDPR principles and data privacy standards by our AI partners remains our foremost concern. Be assured, we'll only introduce these features to our customers once we're entirely confident in these crucial aspects. Additionally, we empower our customers to decide which features they wish to implement within their organisation.

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AI in Survey Tool

The Survey Tool is the first of its kind in itslearning to utilise AI. Educators can simply input a survey topic and watch as AI generates a survey complete with a brief introduction. This tool is designed to help educators save valuable time.

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LAUNCHING:

Q2 2024

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Highly Rated

Easy and efficient, teachers love it!
 

AI Considerations & Concerns

 
 
  • Concerns about the accuracy of Generative AI, specifically Large Language Models (LMM) like Chat GPT
  • The black box problem - The inability for us to see how deep learning systems make their decisions. Without a window into AI models’ methodology, how can we be certain that it is unbiased and ethical?
  • Bias, transparency and fairness - AI has limited critical thinking faculties. With humans being unable to review these processes in place of AI, it is impossible to determine if conclusions have been drawn fairly or whether biased, outdated, or problematic material informed the final decision.
  • Plagiarism - One of the most discussed issues in AI in education. Currently, it is impossible to reliably identify work crafted by generative AI models. 
  • Misinformation - LLMs are designed to offer information by searching databases and making educated guesses based on the most fitting results and probability.  Depending on the tool you use, LLMs in many cases do not provide you with a list of relevant sources for your own review; instead, they present their findings as definitive.
  • Privacy - AI-powered tools have an appetite for data, needing large amounts of information to operate efficiently. In their efforts to enhance the capabilities of AI, schools and educators may unknowingly feed these models with seemingly insignificant data, posing potential privacy risks and unforeseen repercussions.
  • Environmental impact - as generative AI tools are trained with ever larger data sets, requiring more and more energy consumption, what is the energy use impact on the environment?

Conclusion

AI has the potential to change education for the better by making learning more personalised and saving teachers valuable time. But it also comes with considerations and ethical challenges. In itslearning we follow a structured governance process to mitigate these risks, within the six ethical AI principles set by Sanoma:

  1. Fairly towards positive impact
  2. Human responsibility
  3. Explainability
  4. Transparency
  5. Risk and impact assessment
  6. Supervision

If we get these things right, AI can make a big difference while still adhering to the rules. We are mindful of all these considerations in our product development and we urge our customers to do the same when investigating possibilities within AI.

 
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