ABSTRACT
Since November 2022, ChatGPT has had very high visibility in higher education, raising an impressive amount of debate and discussion. These conversations have been focused on both the various risks and issues raised by such powerful AI tools but also on the diverse possibilities they offer to assist, facilitate, and even augment the work of learners and teachers. For many people, ChatGPT represents an eruption of AI in the field of education. Yet this sudden media attention obscures the fact that AI has been present in higher education for many years already. The field of learning analytics is growing significantly in education, resulting in descriptive or predictive analyses based on the traces left by learners in digital environments, and giving rise to predictive dropout models and dashboards that have been implemented in some universities (Ifenthaler & Yau, 2020). Technological developments by large cloud providers make it much easier to accumulate data for analysis (data mining) or to develop intelligent conversational agents (chatbots) that can be used to support students (Heryandi, 2020). The field of AI in education (AIED) focuses on learning analytics, conversational robots and natural language processing, adaptive learning, speech and visual recognition, expert systems, and decision support systems. It now also encompasses generative AI.
