UNESCO "AI Competency Frameworks for Teachers and Students": a Review and Proposed Alternative

During Digital Learning Week (4-7 September 2023), the UNESCO presented its draft AI Competency Frameworks for Teachers and Students for discussion, and later asked for feedback from educators. This article briefly outlines the criteria that can be used to evaluate such models, proceeds to review their strengths and weaknesses, and finally proposes alternatives with adjustments and modifications.

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Criteria: What Makes a Good Framework?

The purpose of the UNESCO's proposed frameworks is to “provide guidance and structure” as students, teachers, and school leaders “navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) in education.” As such, reasonable evaluation criteria seem to be:

• Exhaustivity: the frameworks are comprehensive and include all necessary AI competencies for students and educators
• Relevance: the frameworks are centered and focused on school contexts and uses of AI
• Practicality: the frameworks are simple, clear, and actionable; they can guide school policies and initiatives.

Strengths of the Initial Drafts

With these criteria in mind, the main strengths of the initial drafts are that:

• AI competency frameworks for students and educators are indeed very much needed.
  
• The proposed models build on a number of high-quality guiding documents.
  
• They are also based on powerful guiding principles: 
  
  • Sustainable development
  • Human rights
    
  • Human agency, empowerment, and well-being
    
  • Ethical and responsible AI by design
    
  • Responsiveness to nature and the environment
    
• The overall organization, aligned with the revised Bloom "Understand, Apply, Critique and Create" progression makes sense in an educational context.
  

Limitations of the Initial Drafts

However, the versions presented so far also come with serious limitations, which include:

• The chosen competencies are not always relevant or clear. They are not always specific to education, or centered on AI use in school and with children. This is quite visible in AI Foundations / Create / Models and Visual Representations, for instance.
• The chosen competencies are also sometimes repetitive, making the document overly complex and impractical. Potential combination opportunities are missed. Thus,  "Human Centered AI Mindset", "AI Foundations", and "Ethics of AI" all contain elements that relate to the critical appraisal of AI technologies from normative standpoint.  Likewise, "AI Pedagogy" and "AI Tools" should arguably fall under the same broad category.
• With too many categories, what falls under each can only become unclear, and overlaps are also unavoidable. This, again, makes the document hard to grasp and implement.
• All of the same limitations are even more true of the Students framework, which largely repeats the Teachers framework. Many of its competencies are not really applicable or useful to guide the use of AI by students, and the "standards" are often too high or obscure.
• At the same time, crucial elements seem to be missing, or not clearly included and salient--such as the competency to use AI effectively and appropritely for learning!​

Proposed Alternative Frameworks

The following frameworks are proposed modifications aimed at making the initial models:

• More simple and clear
• More comprehensive
• More relevant to school contexts

The AI Competency Framework for Educators

• Starts with AI Professional Learning, as most teachers are new to AI.
• This PL should allow teachers to develop a sufficient Understanding of AI.
• This understanding can then be the base on which educators build their "Human Centered Mindset", i.e., their critical appreciation of AI (including ethics), and finally their "AI Pedagogy", which brings all of their AI competencies together and applies them in an educational context.

Such AI pedagogies should ensure that students develop the competencies outlined in the AI Competency Framework for Students:

• An Understanding of AI, which is the starting point of the student framework and allows them to
• Use AI effectively for learning,
• But also safely, responsibly, and appropriately.​

AI Competency Framework for Educators

AI Competency Framework for Students