AIED Unplugged: Leapfrogging The Digital Divide To Reach The Underserved

Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) is a driving force to improve education. Nevertheless, policymakers from the Global South fear that AI will increase the digital divide and reduce the opportunities for students in these regions to thrive. To address this problem, we analyzed the past 30 years of data on four aspects of the digital divide. Then, based on these findings and a series of discussions with stakeholders (e.g., policymakers), we proposed the concept of AIED Unplugged. An approach to creating AI-based educational technologies that do not require changes in current school settings (e.g., infrastructure), do not rely on stable internet access, and do not ask for digital skills to use them. We applied this concept to redesign an education policy in Brazil to help students improve their writing skills. Our results show a reduction in time, cost and complexity to running the policy, and a positive impact on more than 500,000 students in 7,000 schools in the country. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.