Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated every layer of our lives, and education is not immune to the effects of AI. In this regard, this study examines AI studies in education in half a century (1970–2020) through a systematic review approach and benefits from social network analysis and text-mining approaches. Accordingly, the research identifies three research clusters (1) artificial intelligence, (2) pedagogical, and (3) technological issues, and suggests five broad research themes which are (1) adaptive learning and personalization of education through AI-based practices, (2) deep learning and machine Learning algorithms for online learning processes, (3) Educational human-AI interaction, (4) educational use of AI-generated data, and (5) AI in higher education. The study also highlights that ethics in AI studies is an ignored research area.

Artificial intelligence has impacted education in recent years. Datafication of education has allowed developing automated methods to detect patterns in extensive collections of educational data to estimate unknown information and behavior about the students. This research has focused on finding accurate predictive models to identify at-risk students. This challenge may reduce the students’ risk of failure or disengage by decreasing the time lag between identification and the real at-risk state. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, an in-depth analysis of a predictive model to detect at-risk students is performed. This model has been tested using data available in an institutional data mart where curated data from six semesters are available, and a method to obtain the best classifier and training set is proposed. Second, a method to determine a threshold for evaluating the quality of the predictive model is established. Third, an early warning system has been developed and tested in a real educational setting being accurate and useful for its purpose to detect at-risk students in online higher education. The stakeholders (i.e., students and teachers) can analyze the information through different dashboards, and teachers can also send early feedback as an intervention mechanism to mitigate at-risk situations. The system has been evaluated on two undergraduate courses where results shown a high accuracy to correctly detect at-risk students.

Learning analytics is quickly evolving. Old fashioned dashboards with descriptive information and trends about what happened in the past are slightly substituted by new dashboards with forecasting information and predicting relevant outcomes about learning. Artificial intelligence is aiding this revolution. The accessibility to computational resources has increased, and specific tools and packages for integrating artificial intelligence techniques leverage such new analytical tools. However, it is crucial to develop trustworthy systems, especially in education where skepticism about their application is due to the risk of teachers’ replacement. However, artificial intelligence systems should be seen as companions to empower teachers during the teaching and learning process. During the past years, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has advanced developing a data mart where all data about learners and campus utilization are stored for research purposes. The extensive collection of these educational data has been used to build a trustworthy early warning system whose infrastructure is introduced in this paper. The infrastructure supports such a trustworthy system built with artificial intelligence procedures to detect at-risk learners early on in order to help them to pass the course. To assess the system’s trustworthiness, we carried out an evaluation on the basis of the seven requirements of the European Assessment List for trustworthy artificial intelligence (ALTAI) guidelines that recognize an artificial intelligence system as a trustworthy one. Results show that it is feasible to build a trustworthy system wherein all seven ALTAI requirements are considered at once from the very beginning during the design phase.