New Initiative from the MIT OpenCourseWare Collaborations Program includes a Call for Proposals

Article by Sara Feijo, originally published on MIT Open Learning Medium | Image by Sarah Schwettmann

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) poses new benefits and challenges for open education. To meet the moment, MIT Open Learning launched today a call for proposals from practitioners around the world for rapid response papers or multimedia projects that explore the future of open education in an AI-shaped ecosystem.

Open Learning will publicly share the projects under an open license. The goal is to bring contributors and funders into conversations that will catalyze research, infrastructure, industry, and teaching innovations to advance open education for learners worldwide, according to Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for open learning at MIT and the project’s principal investigator.

“Generative AI tools can help realize the promise of open education — but only if we leverage insights from across the open education ecosystem’s diverse global stakeholders to think carefully, measure outcomes, and propose actionable new insights that advance the core values of open education,” says Capozzola, whose role at Open Learning includes convening conversations at MIT about AI’s impact on teaching and learning.

Proposals could explore current or future efforts to build public AI tools for open education, identify infrastructural prerequisites to building AI-based public goods, or describe implications of AI for open educational initiatives and resources.

An international jury of experts in AI and open education — chaired by Sarah Schwettmann, research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — will select approximately 20 abstracts. Authors will receive funding from Open Learning upon the publication of their projects.

The portal to submit proposals will close September 1. Selected abstracts will be announced September 30, and the resulting papers or multimedia projects will be published in January 2025.

Learn more about the call for proposals and the submission guidelines.