Name: Can K-12 Teachers and Students Build Open Source AI Tools for Education?
Start: 2026-10-07T16:20:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T16:50:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

Can K-12 Teachers and Students Build Open Source AI Tools for Education?

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT

4 Room T

ID: 33728

There is growing consensus that creation of AI tools built specifically responsive to educational needs and pedagogically grounded are more pertinent, relevant and efficient than generative AI general-purpose tools, like ChatGPT. Even more, AI general-purpose tools also augment the possibility for AI risks to flourish in educational settings.For the creation of AI for Education tools, its also highly recommended to co-design and co-develop those tools with the end-users, teachers and students. This participatory approach looks to open the “black box” of AI and let end-users develop a critical oversight and public scrutiny on these tools, measuring expectations and recognizing the different trade-offs in place.In that context, Open Source AI is better suited for education-specific tailored tools because it enables alignment, control, and sustainability at the system level, not just performance at the model level. Open AI models can be “fine-tuned” on local curriculum and national standards, adapted to specific pedagogical frameworks or enforce desired teaching practices, integrated to existing school systems (grading, reports, LMS), it can be inspected, tested and audited due to its transparency.Opting for Open Source AI comes along with difficult challenges: to exploit its opportunities and unleash participatory “open practices” (fine tuning, distilling, RAG) to build AI for education tools requires demanding technical expertise, for example in K-12 teachers and students.This session looks to discuss about what should be the readiness standard for K-12 teachers and students to participate in the co-design, co-development and testing of Open Source AI tools for K-12 schools. So how can you offer a simplistic, easy to learn framework and a guided-through pipeline for K-12 teachers and students.Alongside end-users, how to protect student privacy with an Open Data schema, in full compliance with data protection laws and without dependency on external APIs, its to be discussed. Lastly, sustainability challenges are also to be discussed as key infrastructure is needed, because custom-built systems are harder to sustain, they can fail without permanent investment due to hidden costs (hardware like GPUs or servers, technical teams, ongoing maintenance).In sum, the session looks to identify the key aspects to consider and catch a glimpse of the context of end user readiness and technical-legal infrastructure to hold the promise that Open Source AI is the option for local educational relevance.

Speakers

Werner Westermann

Can K-12 teachers and students build Open Source AI tools for education?, International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence IRCAI

Werner Westermann Juárez works at the Civic Education Program, at the Library of National Congress of Chile since 2015. He is a History, Geography and Social Sciences Teacher and Bachelor Graduate in History (Pontificia Universidad Católica, Chile) and a Master’s on Open Education... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

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OEGlobal 2026

Werner Westermann

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OEGlobal 2026

Werner Westermann

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