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A key goal of educational institutions around the world is to provide inclusive, equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all learners. Achieving this requires contextualized approaches to accommodate diverse global values and promote learning opportunities that best meet the needs and goals of all learners as individuals and members of different communities. Advances in learning analytics (LA), natural language processes (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI technologies, offer potential to aid educational decision making by supporting analytic insights and personalized recommendations. However, these technologies also raise serious risks for reinforcing or exacerbating existing inequalities; these dangers arise from multiple factors including biases represented in training datasets, the technologies' abilities to take autonomous decisions, and processes for tool development that do not centre the needs and concerns of historically marginalized groups. To ensure that Educational Decision Support Systems (EDSS), particularly AI‐powered ones, are equipped to promote equity, they must be created and evaluated holistically, considering their potential for both targeted and systemic impacts on all learners, especially members of historically marginalized groups. Adopting a socio‐technical and cultural perspective is crucial for designing, deploying, and evaluating AI‐EDSS that truly advance educational equity and inclusion. This editorial introduces the contributions of five papers for the special section on advancing equity and inclusion in educational practices with AI‐EDSS. These papers focus on (i) a review of biases in large language models (LLMs) applications offers practical guidelines for their evaluation to promote educational equity, (ii) techniques to mitigate disparities across countries and languages in LLMs representation of educationally relevant knowledge, (iii) implementing equitable and intersectionality‐aware machine learning applications in education, (iv) introducing a LA dashboard that aims to promote institutional equality, diversity, and inclusion, and (v) vulnerable student digital well‐being in AI‐EDSS. Together, these contributions underscore the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in developing and utilizing AI‐EDSS to not only foster a more inclusive and equitable educational landscape worldwide but also reveal a critical need for a broader contextualization of equity that incorporates the socio‐technical questions of what kinds of decisions AI is being used to support, for what purposes, and whose goals are prioritized in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational technology innovations leveraging large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to automate the laborious process of generating and analysing textual content. While various innovations have been developed to automate a range of educational tasks (eg, question generation, feedback provision, and essay grading), there are concerns regarding the practicality and ethicality of these innovations. Such concerns may hinder future research and the adoption of LLMs‐based innovations in authentic educational contexts. To address this, we conducted a systematic scoping review of 118 peer‐reviewed papers published since 2017 to pinpoint the current state of research on using LLMs to automate and support educational tasks. The findings revealed 53 use cases for LLMs in automating education tasks, categorised into nine main categories: profiling/labelling, detection, grading, teaching support, prediction, knowledge representation, feedback, content generation, and recommendation. Additionally, we also identified several practical and ethical challenges, including low technological readiness, lack of replicability and transparency and insufficient privacy and beneficence considerations. The findings were summarised into three recommendations for future studies, including updating existing innovations with state‐of‐the‐art models (eg, GPT‐3/4), embracing the initiative of open‐sourcing models/systems, and adopting a human‐centred approach throughout the developmental process. As the intersection of AI and education is continuously evolving, the findings of this study can serve as an essential reference point for researchers, allowing them to leverage the strengths, learn from the limitations, and uncover potential research opportunities enabled by ChatGPT and other generative AI models. Practitioner notesWhat is currently known about this topic Generating and analysing text‐based content are time‐consuming and laborious tasks.Large language models are capable of efficiently analysing an unprecedented amount of textual content and completing complex natural language processing and generation tasks.Large language models have been increasingly used to develop educational technologies that aim to automate the generation and analysis of textual content, such as automated question generation and essay scoring.What this paper adds A comprehensive list of different educational tasks that could potentially benefit from LLMs‐based innovations through automation.A structured assessment of the practicality and ethicality of existing LLMs‐based innovations from seven important aspects using established frameworks.Three recommendations that could potentially support future studies to develop LLMs‐based innovations that are practical and ethical to implement in authentic educational contexts.Implications for practice and/or policy Updating existing innovations with state‐of‐the‐art models may further reduce the amount of manual effort required for adapting existing models to different educational tasks.The reporting standards of empirical research that aims to develop educational technologies using large language models need to be improved.Adopting a human‐centred approach throughout the developmental process could contribute to resolving the practical and ethical challenges of large language models in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]