AI‐driven adaptive learning for sustainable educational transformation

Abstract This paper scrutinizes how adaptive learning technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming today's education by making it personalized, accessible, and efficient as well as leading people to accepting, addressing, and mitigating sustainable development. Recently, education witnessed a remarkable technological surge driven by various advances in technology, which can be demonstrated by the increase of the number of scientific publications on this topic from just 1 in 1990 to 636 in 2023. Ongoing digitalization and technological revolution in education together with the novel approach to respect each student's unique learning style and abilities paved the way for adaptive learning technologies represented by the innovative tools that personalize educational experiences to cater to individual learners. All of that contributes to preparing more educated and informed citizens, drives innovation, and supports economic growth necessary for achieving a sustainable future. Our bibliographic study employs VOSviewer to conduct a bibliometric analysis of a total number of 3518 selected publications using the keywords “adaptive learning” and “AI” (represented by articles, proceeding papers, and book chapters) indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database from 1990 to 2024. Our results demonstrate that recent technological changes played a key role in transforming adaptive learning, which was rather reinforced by the “digital surge” in education brought about by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our findings can be useful for further development in the field of adaptive education where they can be employed by the relevant stakeholders and policymakers as well as by the scholars and researchers.