Experts from China and abroad shared their ideas on how artificial intelligence can empower education at an online forum during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday. It attracted some 1 million viewers. Wang Ping, director of the Shanghai Education Commission, shared Shanghai's experience in organizing the largest-ever online education program during the COVID-19 pandemic at the forum venue, the Shanghai Education TV Station. He said Shanghai has been building infrastructure and developing teachers' capability in using modern technology. "More than 3 million teachers and students from Shanghai schools have taught or learnt at home," he said. "It was a test of Shanghai's information development and a precursor to the future online education featuring AI technology."

Andreas Schleicher is a German data scientist--tall and precise with a grey mustache and a steely gaze. The head of the education division at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), he gives off an impression of determined focus. That's useful, considering that he's on a mission to change the way countries around the world teach their children. Society, according to Schleicher, is preparing for the future of work all wrong. We're scared that human jobs will be replaced by robots. But we're still teaching kids to think like machines. "What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate," Schleicher said at the LearnIt conference in London in January. It's fairly easy to teach and test math, for example--but robots happen to be pretty good at math, too.

DUBAI – The teaching methods of Kazuya Takahashi, 35, using Lego blocks and speaking entirely in English, may not be the norm in the Japanese education system. But on a global level, the educator, who teaches at the Kogakuin junior high and high schools in Hachioji, western Tokyo, is considered ahead of the game and has won recognition for his efforts to promote global citizenship. His methods may provide clues as to where education should be heading in Japan, a nation often criticized for focusing more on cramming knowledge rather than encouraging critical thinking. At the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, which ran for two days from March 12, Takahashi gave a presentation as one of the 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, known in the industry as the Nobel Prize in education. The event was attended by around 1,600 people from 110 nations.