Be a trailblazer in ‘Education + AI’

Be a trailblazer in ‘Education + AI’

2024 Teachers’ Day letter from the Executive President

Dear Teachers,

The new academic year has commenced with a grand opening ceremony. The addition of approximately 7,500 new undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students from around the world, along with nearly 400 new staff members, has made our XJTLU community even more vibrant and prosperous. This is all thanks to the wisdom and dedication of our more than 2,300 teachers who work tirelessly in various positions. On the 40th Teachers’ Day, on behalf of our community, I extend my sincerest wishes to all of you: Happy Teachers’ Day!

There are always many things I want to express on festive occasions. This year, I want to take this opportunity to focus on the potential “chemical reaction” between education and artificial intelligence (AI). I hope that, together with XJTLU, we can explore and innovate, contributing wisdom and solutions to “Education + AI”.

AI, with a development history of nearly 70 years, has more recently made people aware of its profound and even disruptive impact on personal life and social development. This has sparked heated discussions and feelings of shock, anxiety, doubt, and even resistance. Under the continuous impact of powerful AI tools, the public now has to accept the reality that AI is reshaping our lives and society. People are gradually calming down and starting to think seriously about how to coexist with it and explore ways to unleash human wisdom using AI.

Although AI is powerful and far-reaching, its process and results depend on the people who collaborate with it. In other words, the future may see “human wisdom”, AI-assisted “digital wisdom”, and “syntegrative wisdom” generated from the dialogue and collaboration of humans and AI. If people can stand on the shoulders of AI and various technologies to form higher-order wisdom, they will create infinite possibilities. Thus, the exploration of “AI+” or “AI empowerment” is trendy and exploding in many areas of society. As education bears the missions of enlightening wisdom, cultivating talents, shaping civilisation, and promoting innovation, it will undoubtedly become the focus of reform, with teachers at the forefront of this technological revolution.

As an explorer and leader in education, XJTLU hopes to provide solutions for future education. It is necessary to stay clear-headed and have a direction in this “surfing” journey. Through systematic thinking and strategy, we strive to form solutions for “AI-empowered education innovation”, encompassing educational philosophy; talent cultivation concepts; training models; learning, teaching, assessment, and support systems; and organisational development. Indeed, AI is having a disruptive impact on human life and society, but it is only one of the many factors driving educational reform in the unpredictable future. Therefore, our exploration direction should be “Education + AI” not “AI + Education”.

When generative AI tools first emerged on the international stage, XJTLU immediately decided to embrace it with the launch of the XJTLU AI platform “JunMou” (XIPU[1]-AI). At the end of 2023, we proposed the “Education + AI” project, prompting immediate actions from the entire community. This initiative led to systematic and innovative “+ AI” reforms, including learning and teaching content, process, goals, assessment, and policy updates. Currently, we have identified 100 modules for preliminary exploration, covering more than 80% of academic units. At the same time, to support students’ digital literacy improvement and cultivate their ability to cooperate with AI, AI general competency modules have been developed and offered to all students.

Our exploration of “Education + AI” does not stop at higher education, but attempts to propose a complete innovation plan for the education system through systematic implementation across the entire education chain. In 2024, while deepening and upgrading XJTLU’s three higher education models (1.0, 2.0, 3.0) with the help of AI, we launched four XJTLU experimental class projects (Shenzhen, Qingdao, Xi’an, Suzhou) at the high school level through our Academy of Future Education. In the Greater Bay Area, we took over four schools from kindergarten to high school, extending the exploration to the field of basic education. At the same time, facing the challenges of digitalisation and AI to professional (vocational) education, we cooperated with Linyi city in Shandong province to build the XIPU-Linyi College of Dream-Chasers, hoping to pave the way for future interest-driven, personalised, lifelong learning, and AI-supported universal (vocational and continuing) education.

My understanding of the education of the future is that its purpose has shifted from “eliminating ignorance” to “helping people cope with a world increasingly marked by uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, changeability, and scarcity (UACCS[2])”. Society will evolve into an ecosystem driven by interest, personalised, lifelong learning, and continuous innovation. Everyone will have the opportunity to stand on the same platform built by AI with the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of humanity and use AI to generate solutions to various problems he or she is facing. At this time, each person’s survival opportunities, development capabilities, and career trajectory depend on their literacy, imagination, creativity, integration abilities, and the “Syntegrative wisdom” generated by the collaboration of “human intelligence” and “digital intelligence”.

In this context, future society and talent needs will be redefined, and educational concepts, training models, and school systems will need disruptive innovation. The current knowledge-oriented teaching process, evaluation methods, and support systems need to be reshaped. Based on this, my guess about the form of future education is that basic education needs to be greatly strengthened and improved, shifting from knowledge education to holistic education, while introducing digital literacy and AI skills training. Because of society’s past emphasis on knowledge learning, it is now necessary to strengthen literacy cultivation, ability improvement, critical thinking development, digital intelligence skills training, interest pursuit encouragement, imagination and creativity development, wisdom nourishment, and self-management ability enhancement. As students gradually mature and can collaborate with AI to answer questions and solve problems, personalised, AI-supported, and integrated higher-order education channels and platforms should be created for them to achieve lifelong learning and innovation and entrepreneurship. At this time, higher education is only one of many educational paths and may become a refueling station that people choose according to the needs of different stages of career development.

Education is of paramount importance to life, family, organisations, society, and the world. As educators, how can we surf the wave of AI reshaping education and move forward at the forefront of the digital intelligence era? Envisioning this exciting and challenging picture, we look forward to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with honour and passion! I hope all teachers actively use new technologies to challenge old models, change old thinking, and join the grand discussion on educational innovation with your unique innovation, experience, and thinking while interacting with AI, helping educational reform take root and continuously enriching and improving XJTLU’s future education solution.

The mission of XJTLU to lead future education has destined us to always stand at the forefront of the world’s rapid changes and move forward bravely! Let’s work together to steer the course in the waves, with our firm belief, tenacious will, courage to break through, wisdom to move forward, solid strength, and down-to-earth actions, to compose the grand symphony of XJTLU’s innovative education and create the career value and happy life that belongs to us educators.

Happy Teachers’ Day, and may every day be fulfilling and exciting!

Professor Youmin Xi

Executive President of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of Liverpool

[1] XIPU is the phonetic pronunciation of the Chinese characters 西浦, a shortened name for XJTLU in Chinese. The term "XIPU" is often associated with XJTLU's initiatives related to social service and collaboration with external partners, such as XIPU AI and the XIPU Think Tank.

[2] Youmin Xi, What Management Could Be and Do --- The Life Story of a Practitioner of Idealism, Peking University Press, 2022, 07. PP328-329