The International E-Learning Conference (IEC) 2023 invited me to deliver the keynote on 1st of September 2023. I selected the title “Social changes for and through e-Learning and AI” for my keynote to address current and future challenges in education.

I’m convinced that digitalisation is a strong (if not the strongest) driver for social changes, not only in education.

E-Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are challenging and changing our societies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, e-Learning was often immediately and broadly introduced without any support and stable infrastructure leading to many problems and inequities.

Afterwards and in particular through the published ChatGPT and its global promotion, AI became popular and impacts now educational settings and systems by offering new opportunities to create media, analyses and decisions. However, the AI services, their black boxes, hallucinations, lacking responsibilities and ongoing integrations into other systems are mostly unclear and non-transparent.

As a consequence, we need to reflect and adapt our current teaching and learning opportunities, especially the grading and assessments with main focus on written examinations and theses.

And we should start the global discussion how e-Learning and AI can be used to strengthen human rights, democracy and rules of law instead of supporting biases, fake news and inequity.