The fifth scenario concerns learning buddies and other educational technologies. Technological changes have revolutionised the classroom and curricula across schools in Europe. In 2025, artificial intelligence has significantly changed education at all levels. Changes implemented in schools are now moving outside the classroom. Companies are advertising new employment opportunities, tailored to the new curricula. Currently, the changes in education in the last seven years can be categorised into four types:
- Move towards collaborative learning
- Use of automation to provide assessment feedback
- Personalisation using big data
- Visualisation that allows visiting extraordinary scenarios (AI-powered virtual reality and augmented reality).
The scenario envisages a future with learning buddies, robots that mentor their young charges, at their command with huge amounts of data from many different sources at their disposal. Educational technologies are redefining the role of the teacher to become a facilitator of the learning activity. Because information is becoming ubiquitous, teachers employ technology to help students in improving their reasoning and critical thinking skills. AI-powered robots help overworked professors to answer thousands of questions over the course of a semester. The public is conflicted on the use of robots. Some people fear that big data means intrusions upon their privacy, which is the central ethical issue, since there will be a generation, collection and manipulation of personal data, specifically of sensitive data. The classroom robots and learning buddies are constantly collecting data from their environment, including interacting with the students, via video and audio monitoring (surveillance) of the humans.
