The study responds to a major transformation in education. Learning is no longer limited to face-to-face classrooms and textbooks. Students increasingly learn through learning management systems, virtual classrooms, smartphones, simulations, and AI-powered applications. These technologies can expand access to information, interaction, and personalized learning. At the same time, however, they can change how learners experience knowledge, communicate with others, and engage with their learning environment.
The authors argue that understanding this transformation requires looking beyond the idea that learning is simply the transfer of information from teachers to students.
Learning Is More Than Receiving Information
The study draws heavily on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized the importance of the lived body in human experience. From this perspective, people do not understand the world only through detached thinking. They experience it through their bodies, senses, movements, emotions, interactions, and relationships with their surroundings.
This perspective changes how learning can be understood. Learning is not simply memorizing information or processing data. It also involves perception, attention, movement, experience, and interaction with other people and the environment. A classroom, therefore, is more than a place where information is exchanged. It is an environment where students experience, interpret, and construct meaning.
The authors connect this philosophical perspective with embodied cognition, an approach that emphasizes the relationship between the brain, body, action, and environment. They also draw on postphenomenology, which examines how technology influences the way humans perceive and interact with the world.
Together, these perspectives suggest that educational technology should not be viewed as a neutral tool.
Technology Changes the Learning Experience
Digital platforms, mobile devices, virtual classrooms, simulations, and AI systems do more than deliver educational content. They create particular ways for learners to see, communicate, interact, and participate.
For example, technology can make information or experiences available that would otherwise be difficult to access. However, digital environments can also reorganize attention and reduce certain forms of direct physical or interpersonal interaction.
The authors therefore describe technology as a mediator of learning. Its significance is not determined only by whether it improves test scores, engagement, efficiency, or satisfaction. Researchers and educators should also consider how a technology changes the relationship between learners, knowledge, other people, and the world.
This becomes particularly important with the rapid development of generative AI.
Generative AI Creates New Opportunities—and New Risks
Unlike many earlier educational technologies, generative AI can actively produce explanations, summaries, arguments, feedback, and other forms of knowledge-like content. This creates opportunities for personalized learning, cognitive support, exploration, and human-AI collaboration.
But the same capabilities can create a new risk: students may begin to rely on AI for activities that are essential to learning itself.
The authors distinguish between AI as augmentation and AI as substitution.
AI acts as augmentation when it helps learners explore ideas, consider alternative explanations, ask better questions, reflect on their work, or access additional information. In contrast, AI becomes substitution when learners allow the system to perform the core intellectual activities that should remain their own.
These activities include questioning information, reasoning, interpreting evidence, developing arguments, and making judgments.
The issue, therefore, is not simply whether students use AI. The more important question is whether AI strengthens or weakens their ability to think independently.
When AI Assistance Goes Too Far
The study also examines the concept of cognitive offloading, in which people use external tools to reduce or extend mental effort. The authors note that cognitive offloading is not necessarily harmful. Humans have always used tools such as writing, diagrams, maps, and calculators to extend their cognitive abilities.
The problem arises when assistance becomes a replacement for intellectual responsibility.
A student who accepts an AI-generated explanation without checking its evidence, questioning its assumptions, or understanding its reasoning may gradually transfer responsibility for knowing and judging from the human learner to the machine.
For this reason, the authors argue that AI literacy should go beyond knowing how to operate AI tools or identify misinformation. Students should also understand how AI changes their own process of knowing.
Three Dimensions of Learning in the AI Era
The proposed framework brings together three interconnected dimensions of learning:
The framework ultimately describes learning in the AI era as embodied, relational, and technologically mediated. Technology can extend human learning, but it should not replace the human capacity to understand and make meaning.
Teachers Remain Essential
The findings also suggest that the growing capabilities of AI do not make teachers less important.
Instead, the role of teachers may become even more focused on activities that AI cannot simply replace: facilitating dialogue, creating meaningful learning experiences, encouraging interpretation, supporting ethical judgment, and developing critical evaluation.
Teachers can help students move beyond simply accepting AI-generated answers. Students need to learn how to question those answers, examine their context, evaluate their reliability, and develop their own responses.
For schools and universities, this means AI-based education should not be evaluated only by efficiency, academic achievement, or personalization. Its impact on attention, interaction, student agency, embodied experience, and meaningful engagement should also be considered.
The researchers recommend designing AI-supported learning activities that require students to question, interpret, evaluate, and reflect on AI-generated content rather than simply reproduce it. They also call for broader AI literacy that includes awareness of how AI influences perception, knowledge construction, and judgment.
A Human-Centered Future for AI in Education
The study is a philosophical-conceptual literature review, rather than an experiment involving students or teachers. The authors synthesized philosophical and interdisciplinary literature on embodied learning, cognition, technological mediation, and AI-mediated education. Because the proposed framework has not yet been tested empirically, the authors recommend future studies involving learners and educators in different educational settings.
Their central message is straightforward: the future of AI-powered education should not be measured by how much human work technology can replace. Instead, it should be measured by how effectively technology can expand human possibilities for learning while preserving human agency.
As Andreas, Samosir, and Saragih argue, meaningful learning requires people to remain capable of perceiving, questioning, interpreting, evaluating, and making judgments. AI can assist those processes, but the responsibility for meaning and judgment should remain with the human learner.
Author Profiles
Otto Mart Andreas — Universitas Pelita Harapan. His contribution to the article focuses on learning epistemology, embodied learning, technology-mediated learning, and AI in education. Academic degree information is not stated in the source article.
Elisabet Marthawati Samosir — Universitas Pelita Harapan. Her contribution is part of the article's conceptual examination of learning, technology, and AI-mediated education. Academic degree information is not stated in the source article.
Elfrida Saragih — Universitas Pelita Harapan. Her contribution is part of the conceptual analysis of learning and educational transformation in the digital and AI era. Academic degree information is not stated in the source article.
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