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JIMMY MOYAHA: We are taking a look at the world of artificial intelligence (AI), especially where it relates to education and how it could be used in education and in furthering the educational conversations that we have. For more on this, I’m joined on the line by the dean of curricula and research at Eduvos, Dr Miné de Klerk, to take a look at the role of artificial intelligence in modern education.
Dr de Klerk, lovely having you on the show, thanks so much for taking the time. Artificial intelligence has forced us to rethink a lot of things. What has it done to the educational landscape?
DR MINÉ DE KLERK: It’s been massively, massively disruptive, of course, but I do think in a good way. It has completely changed our position – and maybe it’s long overdue – as the ‘conveyors of knowledge’ to rather facilitating real-world experiences. Where we used to assess students for perfect outputs, we are now rather focusing on the journey of learning.
Because: AI can produce the perfect answer. What we now want from students is to show that they have those real skills that future employers are looking for, and that is hard to assess. So it’s been quite a journey, but I think a good one, in a way.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Dr de Klerk, how do we start to think about the use case for AI in higher education in particular? A lot has been said around artificial intelligence being used to take shortcuts in the learning process, being used as an alternative to what we traditionally, as you mentioned, use to assess the learning process. But you also did mention that this does present a set of opportunities.
In that opportunity set, how do institutions, lecturers, and even students themselves need to start thinking about using artificial intelligence differently so that we still rely on our own human judgement?
DR MINÉ DE KLERK: Well, firstly, I think we all need to acknowledge that AI is here to stay. We cannot even ask a student to not use AI. It’s not fair. It’s part of their smartphones. It’s embedded in their Microsoft tools. It’s pretty much in any digital tool you use – it has some form of AI embedded into it. So that’s the first one.
Secondly, we need to acknowledge that AI has massively disrupted careers and professions. For a while now we haven’t been preparing students for one job – it’s now no longer just preparing them to become a lawyer or an accountant. It’s completely changing the mix of skills that you need within specific jobs.
But I think that is useful to know because it changes the focus in learning. So we know in future the fastest-growing jobs will likely be, according to the World Economic Forum, big data specialists and fintech engineers and all these wonderful new titles that you and I probably didn’t even think of when we were studying. But it also means that there is still a place for a farmer, for instance. But a farmer will probably just use more satellite imagery and AI-supported weather analysis.
So, are we teaching students to think about agriculture in a tech-informed way? We will still need nurses, probably more than ever, but are we aware that they will probably use AI support in patient monitoring systems? And are we also acknowledging that we still want our human nurses to exercise clinical and interpersonal judgement?
Suddenly there’s this interesting and rich mix of what we call soft and hard skills and non-linear progression for students. It’s going to be a very interesting world for them. They’re probably going to occupy multiple careers, many job titles we haven’t even think thought of. But that just means we are preparing them to be flexible, adaptable, ethical and values-driven. Our mission in higher education is to rise to the challenge with them.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Dr de Klerk, you mentioned ethical and responsible use. I want to get your thoughts on perhaps the role that academia plays in that, perhaps the role that academic institutions and even parents play in ethical and responsible use of technology that is, as you rightly mentioned, embedded in our everyday cell phones and in our everyday lives.
DR MINÉ DE KLERK: It’s such a lovely question, because just asking that question already acknowledges that it’s something we all need to face. We often think, oh, AI misuse, academic integrity, this is a student issue- so we want to monitor or police our students.
But the South African Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has already had a national lesson in AI and ethics. As you probably recall, in just April 2026, the department withdrew its first national AI policy after, I think it was 67 fictitious and completely AI-generated references that were discovered in the document. The irony was a bit difficult to miss. Here we had national policy intended to govern AI, but it failed one of the most basic tests of responsible and ethical AI use, which is just verifying your sources.
We can learn two important lessons here. Firstly, that AI output can look fantastically authoritative and pass through several layers of review. Secondly, just because you’re a senior or experienced or in a position to even write a policy, it doesn’t protect you from AI error. And therein lies the issue around how to use it ethically.
We need to recognise these tools are fallible. We need to recognise it will misuse sometimes personal and sensitive data. So, it’s a problem for all of us. I think once we realise that it’s not just students – students actually do want to use AI ethically, but we continually have to be in dialogue with them.
So let’s take this AI output and look at it critically. Can we really verify all these sources, and does it represent our context or only Global North data? Does it draw perhaps from sensitive data? This is something we continually have to ask ourselves. It’s not just up to our students. Even for our lecturers, AI literacy means grappling with the ethics of it – and it will always be an issue.
We are now seeing even the largest AI firms, – take for instance, Anthropic, the company behind Claude – even they recently (I think it was only a couple of weeks ago), argued that the world should probably retain the option to pause our AI development because these systems are becoming very difficult to control.
So, we need to grapple with it together and treat our students as partners. Have the dialogue with them, not just trying to catch them out or to monitor them.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Artificial intelligence certainly is here to stay, and if it is to be used for the furtherance of education, it is important that we think about this ethically and sustainably so that we can preserve future generations’ integrity.
We’ll leave the conversation on that note. Dean of curricula and research at Eduvos, Dr Miné de Klerk, joining us to take a look at the role of artificial intelligence in modern education.
Brought to you by Eduvos.
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