Abstract:

In recent years, artificial intelligence has brought such great and significant changes that every aspect of society has been impacted. However, although not the first thing that might be considered, we believe that artificial intelligence will actually bring the greatest changes in education, especially in higher education. One possible scenario is that greater emphasis will be placed on acquiring skills and thinking at a higher, conceptual level, while the focus on acquiring numerous specific in-depth knowledge may diminish. How the education system will respond to these changes is difficult to determine, as this technology, despite bringing many benefits, also presents many challenges. One of the greatest challenges is the ethical use of this technology, especially in education and science, so it is important to work on raising awareness among students for responsible use. In any case, the key term that will certainly be heard in the coming years will be personalised education.

However, personalised education is still far off, and this is a highly demanding process with a transition period that will last a very long time. Therefore, an opportunity has been identified at the University of Mostar to first integrate AI into certain tasks outside the teaching process.

Through the analysis of the existing challenges that drain the time resources of this establishment, we found several key points where improvements can be made or certain tasks can be automated and made easier. Thus, in the past year, 3 projects have been launched that facilitate the work of teachers and students. One such project is the AI assistant for the e-Diary application for schools, developed by the University's IT center. A chatbot has been created to facilitate users' work with the e-Diary application and provide 24/7 instant customer support, significantly relieving the burden on customer support services. Additionally, the Smart Reception project was presented, which won 4th place on the WURI ranking for the application of generative AI for academic 2023/2024. year. This project involves a voice assistant that helps students quickly and easily access information about schedules, exams, and general university information. Another significant project for university teachers that we are particularly proud of is the Smart Syllabus. This project uses a multi-step wizard to collect input information from teachers regarding course objectives, teaching units, literature, and more, and then adapts and fills out the syllabus tables, a task that previously required considerable manual effort and time.

What is not talked about enough is that generative AI is always associated with system user data, which is often private and sensitive, so it is important to emphasize privacy, security and ethical use. Training AI models on commercial large language and visual models can cause data leakage, so we believe that Universities with their IT and AI centers should have their own data centers and use open source models, even at the cost that these models will perform worse than commercial ones.

In conclusion, artificial intelligence should not be viewed as a threat but as an opportunity, and it is merely a tool that can elevate education to a higher level than before. The integration of artificial intelligence into teaching is something we should strive for, with a special emphasis on personalised education.

Keywords:

Artificial intelligence, Education, Data privacy.