Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1007/s11423-025-10549-z

Publication Title

Educational Technology Research and Development

Pages

25 pp.

Abstract

Despite the potential benefits offered by GenAI technologies to provide innovative solutions to address distinct challenges faced by working adult learners (ALs) in higher education and beyond, there is limited understanding of how best to structure AI-powered learning for this population while ensuring their distinct needs and perspectives are considered. Hence, this study aimed to determine what curriculum and student-AI interaction would be required by situating ALs’ views. Through analyzing 48 e-portfolios and in-depth interviews with 20 ALs from diverse educational and professional backgrounds, the study found that ALs perceived content mastery and developing a lifelong habit of learning as the optimal learning goals for AI-powered learning. AI-powered learning can be facilitated through personalized mastery-based learning and collaborative performance-based tasks, in tandem with scenario-based assessment, unobtrusive gamified assessment, and competency-based assessment. Along this line, AL articulated various necessary supports to foster AL-AI interactions. While AL identified metacognition and developing diverse and high-quality questions as crucial to support AL-AI cognitive interaction, they also highlighted that building ethical AL-AI relationships is important for enhancing AL-AI socio-emotional interaction. In addition, AL perceived immersive game-based platforms and interactive interfaces could serve as effective mediums for enhancing student-AI interactions. These findings can provide a more comprehensive understanding of AI-powered adult learning and implications for the design of educational AI, as well as instructional design to improve the educational experience for ALs.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "N/A."

Original Publication Citation

Kim, J., Yu, S., Detrick, R., Lin, X., & Li, N. (2025). Designing AI-powered learning: Adult learners' expectations for curriculum and human-AI interaction. Educational Technology Research and Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-025-10549-z

ORCID

0000-0002-3365-7354 (Kim), 0000-0003-1087-3713 (Yu), 0009-0000-5610-2864 (Detrick)

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