Empowering Open Education Methodologies with AI-based Strategies for the Customization of Education

The amount and heterogeneity of data generated in the context of education allied to the rapid progress of scientific research and technological development have created vast amounts of data, much of it open data, but significant challenges to gathering, filtering and making sense of this information. In this paper, we discuss the research outcomes of complementary Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based strategies monitoring and enhancing Open Education, mining online forum interaction student-educator, and empowering mentorship of educators. Firstly, the initial results obtained from the construction of an Observatory focusing Open Education Resources (OERs), contribute to implement 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation and advance the Education-focused Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4. It is acting on five verticals, enriching and treating multilingual data, it displays meaningful information on a dashboard focused on AI and OERs and serving as a collaboration platform focused on existing partnerships within the international research centre on AI under the auspices of UNESCO (IRCAI), the UNESCO Chair in Distance Education and the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning, mobilizing research collaboration on key AI research challenges relating to generating knowledge about OER. Secondly, we will discuss the recent development of an Educational Recommender System (ERS) that integrates Conversational Analysis (CA) to assess and enhance collaborative learning (CL) in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). This novel system was designed to identify collaboration among students and provide tailored recommendations to promote participation and interaction within discussion forums. Finally, we will discuss the development and implementation of AI and OERs in alignment with SDGs, addressing topics of significant social impact over an international online mentoring initiative.