The use of AI by undergraduate students of Social Education in Spain and Portugal: A case study

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently transforming many areas of society, including education. AI offers innovative tools and methods that personalise learning, automate processes and improve the educational experience. Social education seeks to foster integral human development and collective well-being, and AI can be a powerful tool to achieve these goals. For this reason, the main objective of this study is to learn about the use of AI by future social educators. This research is approached from a qualitative methodology. A total of 69 undergraduate students of Social Education from two universities in Spain and Portugal participated in the study. As results and conclusions, it is worth highlighting that future social educators define AI with key words such as tools, technology or help-solution. Most of the students had used AI throughout their academic life. In fact, they used AI academically, at work and personally to search for information or to generate images, mainly through ChatGPT (version 4.0). They highlighted as an advantage the speed of the information, a time-saving feature. The main limitation was the reduction in activities. In general, they considered that AI has a positive impact and would like to continue using it.