Teaching – Professional Learning

Simulated Students offer a valuable methodological framework for evaluating pedagogical approaches and modelling diverse learner profiles, tasks which are otherwise challenging to undertake systematically in real-world settings. Recent research has increasingly focused on developing such simulated agents to capture a range of learning styles, cognitive development pathways, and social behaviours. Among contemporary simulation techniques, the integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational research has emerged as a particularly versatile and scalable paradigm.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in education, posing significant challenges for teachers adapting to these changes. GenAI offers unprecedented opportunities for accessibility, scalability and productivity in educational tasks. However, the automation of teaching tasks through GenAI raises concerns about reduced teacher agency, potential cognitive atrophy, and the broader deprofessionalisation of teaching.

This chapter introduces the AI & Data Acumen Learning Outcomes Framework, a comprehensive tool designed to guide the integration of AI literacy across higher education. Developed through a collaborative process, the framework defines key AI and data-related competencies across four proficiency levels and seven knowledge dimensions. It provides a structured approach for educators to scaffold student learning in AI, balancing technical skills with ethical considerations and sociocultural awareness.

Effective presentation skills are essential in education, professional communication, and public speaking, yet learners often lack access to high-quality exemplars or personalized coaching. Existing AI tools typically provide isolated functionalities such as speech scoring or script generation without integrating reference modeling and interactive feedback into a cohesive learning experience. We introduce a dual-agent system that supports presentation practice through two complementary roles: the Ideal Presentation Agent and the Coach Agent.

Simulating Professions (SP) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate professional roles. However, comprehensive psychological and ethical evaluation in these contexts remains lacking. This paper introduces EMNLP, an Educator-role Moral and Normative LLMs Profiling framework for personality profiling, moral development stage measurement, and ethical risk under soft prompt injection. EMNLP extends existing scales and constructs 88 teacher-specific moral dilemmas, enabling profession-oriented comparison with human teachers.

Educational dialogue -- the collaborative exchange of ideas through talk -- is widely recognized as a catalyst for deeper learning and critical thinking in and across contexts. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful force in education, with the potential to address major challenges, personalize learning, and innovate teaching practices. However, these advances come with significant risks: rapid AI development can undermine human agency, exacerbate inequities, and outpace our capacity to guide its use with sound policy.

Training and education in human-centered fields require authentic practice, yet realistic simulations of human behavior have remained limited. We present a multi-agent psychological simulation system that models internal cognitive-affective processes to generate believable human behaviors. In contrast to black-box neural models, this system is grounded in established psychological theories (e.g., self-efficacy, mindset, social constructivism) and explicitly simulates an ``inner parliament'' of agents corresponding to key psychological factors.

Objective and scalable measurement of teaching quality is a persistent challenge in education. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential, general-purpose models have struggled to reliably apply complex, authentic classroom observation instruments. This paper uses custom LLMs built on sentence-level embeddings, an architecture better suited for the long-form, interpretive nature of classroom transcripts than conventional subword tokenization. We systematically evaluate five different sentence embeddings under a data-efficient training regime designed to prevent overfitting.

Designing Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) for higher education requires addressing complex human-technology interactions, especially where staff turnover and changing roles create ongoing challenges for reusing knowledge. While advances in process mining and Generative AI enable new ways of designing features to support knowledge management, existing KMSs often overlook the realities of educators' workflows, leading to low adoption and limited impact.

Emotion education is a crucial lesson for children aged 3 to 6. However, existing technologies primarily focus on promoting emotion education from the child's perspective, often neglecting the central role of parents in guiding early childhood emotion development at home. In this work, we conducted co-design sessions with five experienced kindergarten teachers and five parents to identify parental challenges and the roles that AI can play in family emotion education. Guided by these insights, we developed PACEE, an assistant for supporting parent-AI collaborative emotion education.