ICWL-SETE 2025

Keynote Speakers

Human Learning with AI: Between Growth and Dependence

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the ways individuals engage with learning and adapt to the demands of modern work. As the half-life of knowledge and skills diminishes more quickly over time, learners need to continually evolve how they acquire, refine, and apply what they know. While AI technologies offer valuable opportunities to personalize support and boost performance, they also raise concerns about learners becoming overly dependent on AI systems. Such dependency may weaken essential capabilities such as critical thinking, self-monitoring, and decision-making. This talk will explore how learners can build adaptive skills that allow them to interact effectively with AI while maintaining control over their own learning processes. It introduces a conceptual framework centered on self-regulation and metacognition, with a focus on how learners can make informed decisions about when and how to delegate cognitive and metacognitive tasks to AI systems. Drawing on a series of empirical studies, the talk will outline key considerations for research, policy, and learning design that aim to support learner agency and resilience in AI-mediated environments.

Biography

Dragan Gašević is Distinguished Professor of Learning Analytics in the Faculty of Information Technology and the Director of the Centre for Learning Analytics at Monash University. Dragan's research interests center around data analytic, AI, and design methods that can advance understanding of self-regulated and collaborative learning. He is a founder and served as the President (2015-2017) of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. He has also held several honorary appointments in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He is a recipient of the Life-time Member Award (2022) as the highest distinction of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and a Distinguished Member (2022) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2019-2024, he was recognized as the national field leader in educational technology in The Australian's Research Magazine that is published annually. He led the EU-funded SHEILA project that received the Best Research Project of the Year Award (2019) from the Association for Learning Technology.

Education Transformation in the Era of AI

Biography

Professor Jiannong Cao is Vice President (Education), Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in Data Science, Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing in the Department of Computing and Director of the Institute for Higher Education Research and Development (IHERD) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He served as Head of the Department of Computing from 2011 to 2017, Dean of the Graduate School, and Head of the College of Undergraduate Researchers and Innovators (CURI) from 2021 to 2025 at PolyU. Professor Cao's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, wireless sensing and networking, big data and AI, and mobile cloud and edge computing. He published six co-authored and nine co-edited books, along with over 800 papers in major international journals and conference proceedings, and holds 34 patents. He received many awards for his outstanding research achievements. Professor Cao is a member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering, a fellow of IEEE, a fellow of the CCF, and a distinguished member of the ACM. He served as the Chair of the Technical Committee on Distributed Computing of the IEEE Computer Society from 2012 to 2014. In 2017, he received the Overseas Outstanding Contribution Award from the China Computer Federation.