Navigating the new frontier: large language models and their implications for education

Abstract

This survey characterizes the contributions of large language models (LLMs) to technology enhanced learning by relating their capabilities to actual educational functions, making comparisons with traditional models of language. The contributions for this study are: i) introduce an education centered taxonomy that classifies LLM use by four key functions personalization and adaptivity, assessment and evaluation, profiling and prediction, and intelligent tutoring with illustrations from deployed systems and tools; ii) give a domain-based comparison of where LLMs outperform traditional models (sentiment analysis with sarcasm, context-aware question answering, and abstractive summarization) and why those advantages will mean something to e-learning practice; iii) synthesize six cross-cutting risks, including computational cost/carbon, privacy, bias and hallucination, labor displacement, interpretability, and the limits of human-like judgment, and provide practical design/research implications; and iv) report on a transparent review protocol that got the initial corpus down to 50 key articles, allowing for modifications and future updates from other interested researchers. In sum, the discussion about LLMs in education has been pushed past the broad strokes to a situation where there is a comprehensive vocabulary for what LLMs can do, and how they may or may not responsibly improve learning experiences, educator workflows, and systems/learning design in e-learning.