Exponential development of technologies changes the existential environment, and as a consequence, human behavior and consciousness. There are dramatic changes in all spheres of life. The boundaries and possibilities of the educational environment are expanding, radically changing the way knowledge is transmitted, acquired and assessed. Unfortunately, education lags behind the pace of technologies development and loses its role as provider of agents of changes. It is required a change in the paradigm of education, which is capable of developing in synergy with advanced technologies without loosing its fundamental values and achievements that have stood the test of time, but multiplying them through new opportunities. Such synergy can become the basis for standardized frameworks in new paradigm coordinates.
For strategic orientation on the way to new standards it is necessary to understand new type of education features in order to determine its needs and possibilities. The systems analysis identified the following coordinates:
1) human-centered;
2) practice-oriented;
3) integrating advanced technologies;
4) transparent/explainable;
5) integrating quality teaching;
6) manageable (measurable and providing continuous feedback);
7) capable of development in pace of technological trends, institutional and educational needs;
8) scalable;
9) multi-agent/sectoral/disciplinary;
10) cross-cultural;
11) focused on universal values;
12) safe.
To implement such education, new technological opportunities for synergetic interaction of human and artificial (symbolic and generative) intelligence have emerged. They not only invest in the availability, pace, volume, scaling and impact of education, but also allow significant improvement of its quality by technologizing efficient multi-agent/sectoral/ disciplinary synergetic interaction and co-creation. At the same time, problems that carry the risk of losing control are proportionally multiplied along with the opportunities. It is needed to prevent possible negative consequences of AI integration before they become irreversible.
One way to prevent risks is to introduce standards as a basis for trust, interaction, and accountability to ensure the reliability and ethics of AI-Powered Education. It is proposed to align innovations with global standards through the use of standardized frameworks in the development, deployment, and management of AI based solutions aimed at meaningful and sustainable learning. It is assumed that standardized AI solutions can improve the learning and teaching process. Here the question arises, how to preserve uniqueness and diversity as conditions for quality education that ensures survival in the face of uncertainty? What should standardized frameworks be like so that with obvious new advantages, we do not lose the already achieved level of quality education, which provided such Developmental Capacity (DC) that made the emergence of advanced technologies possible? After all, they were created by those who received education within the existing education system.
We propose an original approach, to create standardized frameworks, not from scratch, but using time-tested standards in synergy of the best educational models with new technologies. In other words, to embody the best educational models in advanced technologies, without losing their diversity, developmental capacity and quality standards. Is it possible?
We believe that it is possible if we focus on how living systems do it, which are characterized by an ambivalent desire for preservation and development. It is the driving force of development, which occurs in the process of balancing needs-resources-conditions, working as a perpetuum mobile of development, generating new non-equilibrium states in the balancing process itself, triggering the need to continue the developmental process. In our case the strategic sense/need is development itself, the condition is standardization, and the developmental environment is the resource that must balance with needs and conditions.
This universal mechanism is based on a deep scientific understanding of the process of self-development of living systems, which has been tested by a long-term formative experiment and subsequent many years of practice in the conditions of natural university education. As a result, Eco-Humanistic approach, concept, model embodied in the Technology of Self-Development (EHTSD) appeared reflecting the civilizational need for human-existential environment synergetic interaction causing their co-development. In the EHTSD the environment is presented in a broad sense, as a natural, social and virtual one, and human as a “system of systems” integrating eco-socio-techno spheres. It is notable that the EHTSD fully corresponds to the New European Scientific and Educational Paradigm standing on 3 pillars:
1) sustainable development (socio-economic-ecological);
2) human well-being;
3) inclusiveness.
In the educational context it is reflected as strategic focus:
1) sustainability – on developmental capacity (DC);
2) well-being – on human/student-centered education;
3) inclusiveness – on multi-agent/sector/disciplinary co-creation.
Developmental process modeled by EHTSD comes through 7 stages of the developmental circle (event – meaning – opportunity – choice – action – automation – event), served by 4 mechanisms (synergy of consciousness and behavior, driving forces, capacity and optimization of self-development). It is noteworthy that the mechanisms of driving forces and optimization are universal and coincide with the key mechanisms of AI (backpropagation and gradient descent). EHTSD modeling allows to present self-development in the process of human-environment interaction in the format structure-content pattern of both discipline and student, where the content is structured and the structure is meaningful. Such a representation:
1) provides a single system of coordinates for both discipline and student in the context of labor market needs;
2) allows to compare both cognitive-sense structures,
3) highlights development zones,
4) measures the dynamics and success of training in cognitive, personality, social, professional and existential dimensions;
5) unifies the process, ensuring a high DC based on scientifically substantiated schemes for disciplines regardless of their specificity;
6) creates conditions for the integration of human intelligence and AI (symbolic and generative).
The proposed approach allows to qualitatively solve the problem of curriculum calculations without losing its DC, by deriving the subject (all its phenomena) from its essence as a system-forming factor. It is the connection between the functions (expressed in weights), allowing to ensure isomorphism of the models of artificial and human intelligence, to determine their similarities and diversities, to organize their synergetic interaction and co-development.
Student-centeredness is reflected in the strategic focus on the cognitive-personality development of target profile. The ideal profile of a graduate as agent of development reflects professionally-socially-emotionally competent, efficient-moral-harmonious, globally thinking, locally acting agent of society sustainable development and a subject of self-development.
Thus, EHTSD can set standardized frameworks within the new paradigm, since it provides:
1) transparent and explainable principles for organizing efficient educational activities based on a deep scientific understanding of their patterns and mechanisms;
2) synergy of human and artificial intelligence, and, as a consequence, synergy of AI-Powered Education and high-quality, time-tested education, without losing creativity and diversity as a condition for synergistic development;
3) high DC of innovative courses due to synergy of natural process of self-development and new opportunities that allow modeling and, as a consequence, technologizing creating previously unavailable opportunities for its management, measurement, scaling, impact at a speed and in volumes inaccessible to traditional education.