By Katrina Dix
These days, Helen Crompton, Ph.D., is never quite sure what time zone she’s in.
Spin a globe or ask Google Maps for a random location, and you’re likely to land near one of the keynote speeches on artificial intelligence in education that crowd her calendar. Over the last year alone, she’s spoken in South Africa, Singapore, India, Hungary, Indonesia, Croatia and the United Kingdom, as well as all over the U.S.
But one of her favorite destinations is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris.
She visits each fall to work in person with colleagues she collaborates with year-round on projects, such as developing the United Nations AI frameworks for education.
“These recommendations are targeted for global leaders, policymakers and funders, but anyone can go in and use the framework,” Dr. Crompton said. “They are overarching global suggestions on policies and guidelines, but they also consider challenges, like limited internet connectivity and electricity.”
Dizzying international travel is not what Dr. Crompton, now the executive director of , expected during the first chapter of her career as a U.K. classroom teacher. She turned to research over 10 years ago to build on her interest in mobile learning before the topic gained global momentum, turning her into one of the world’s leading experts.
Then she did it again — with AI.
Dr. Crompton’s research began shifting to AI in education around 2017. After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, generative AI’s explosion in popularity catapulted her to the front of the field.
The United Nations first approached her in 2019 to help develop frameworks in a policy forum “to discuss the different pathways that governments are using to harness AI and ensure that it does not deepen the existing inequalities in AI-powered education,” she was told at the time.
Now, Dr. Crompton leads a study to examine whether outcomes of the competency framework for teachers (CFT) are meeting project goals and to consider potential revisions. The guidelines define the knowledge, skills and values teachers should master in the age of AI, with principles for protecting teachers’ rights, enhancing human agency and promoting sustainability. The CFT outlines 15 competencies across five dimensions: human-centered mindset, ethics of AI, AI foundations and applications, AI pedagogy and AI for professional learning.
A human-centered mindset, according to UNESCO, emphasizes “the enhancement of human capabilities and the promotion of social justice, sustainability and human dignity.”
“People have a lot of emotions about AI, fears about taking jobs or allowing cheating. Positives are not always seen,” Dr. Crompton said. “I could tell you loads of positive things that kind of blow your mind.”
Examples range from DeepMind AI solving the 50-year-old protein folding puzzle whose solution could help develop medicines, make biofuel and break down plastic, to AI-generated voices for American Sign Language users and stroke survivors that replicate how they sounded before losing their voices and AI systems being developed to decode animal communication and enable interspecies dialogue.
“I would love to hear what my dogs are constantly talking about,” she said.
In education, Dr. Crompton has always seen the opportunities technology offers when used to support critical thinking, not replace it — a futuristic path that shows no sign of slowing.
“Ninety percent of my conversations, all day, every day are about AI,” Dr. Crompton said. “Changes are not just daily. They are by the hour.”
