Abstract:

This research aimed to identify the stage of Brazilian literature on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to online education. The Higher Education (HE) in Brazil is still developing with many individuals without access to it. The government’s goal for 2024 is to achieve a gross enrollment rate of 50% and a net rate of 33%. In 2019 theses parameters were 37.4% and 21.4%, respectively. The Brazilian HE market is the biggest of Latin America with almost two million of students completing high school each year and able to start an undergraduate program (MEC, 2020). In this sense, the online education has been used by the Brazilian State to accelerate the number of graduates and the AI has been considered essential to reach a greater number of students and maintain the quality of education (Torres et al., 2019). Understanding how the Brazilian literature is addressing this theme is important to identify trends and gaps in the educational process and also opportunities of research. In this way, to reach the propose of the paper we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) using the Brazilian Digital Library of Dissertations and Theses to find all the research done in graduate programs which investigate the subject of AI applied to online education. By searching the combination of “artificial intelligence” with “online education”, “learning”, “education” and “teaching” codes in the Portuguese language for the titles, abstracts, and keywords we found a first amount of 519 works. After analyzing the content of each research and excluding the cases which were not applied to this investigation, we selected a total of 63 studies to SLR. Of this total 26 are master’s thesis and 37 doctoral dissertations. The first research reviewed dates from 1994 and the last from 2020. The main results of our paper highlight the same concern previous research on AI found to other region and contexts (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). Most of the research on AI in online education selected in this SLR were conducted in Computer Science (60%) and Engineering (27%). Only 11% of the studies reviewed are from Education master’s and doctoral programs.

Reflecting this scenario almost all the selected studies focus on the development and evaluation of new AI tools to improve the online education, which might be segregated in four groups:
i) profile identification and forecast,
ii) performance and evaluation,
iii) adaptative systems and personalization, and
iv) smart tutorials systems.

Our analysis show that little attention is paid to critical topics related to the growing introduction of AI in online education, as such professor’s employability and technological training or ethical implication for the educational process. The absence of the Education field in the discussion of AI is concerning since the introduction of new technologies might has many impacts on society. As a result of this SLR we suggest opportunities of research considering the stage of AI agenda.

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Online Education.