"Our students are ready for AI driven skills mapping" - IET Director contributes to international panel

Speaking to an international audience and a panel made up of education experts, IET Director Bart Rienties recently made the case that The Open University is uniquely placed to safely and effectively roll out personalised, AI-driven service to help students map, and communicate, their skills. 

Bart Rienties, director at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at The Open University (OU) appeared as a panellist this month on an online seminar Beyond Degrees: Mapping Skills with AI across Asia and Europe, hosted by ASEM Education. Bringing together higher education experts across Asia and Europe, the discussion explored the pressing questions surrounding the integration of AI to higher education practices, from the potentials to the pitfalls and asked - how can institutions make meaningful, responsible, and ethical use of AI-driven skills mapping? 

Speaking to the question of what value AI driven approaches could offer to help students better understand, as well as communicate, their own competencies, Bart stressed that the key is personalisation, commenting;

“What we have been doing at the OU for many years is basically use our technology to support this kind of personalisation of learning – everyone is unique and different, but if you do this at scale there is this tendency to make everything the same for everyone. So for the past decade we’ve primarily used big data to see how we can give more personalised advice to our tutors initially but also to our students.

When you’re ‘open’, and you’re’ recruiting so many diverse students, you want to make sure that you’re providing this different approach, but it is really difficult to do this right. The biggest hurdle is not the technology, it’s how can we convince our community around us that this might be a positive thing!”

Our students are really ready for this, they trust that we as the Open University can provide this personalised service to them… if we do this in a safe and well-designed manner, that we can actually do this much better than the big tech companies can do.”

The recording of Beyond Degrees: Mapping Skills with AI across Asia and Europe is available in full on the ASEM Education YouTube channel.