Adoption of Educational Fourth Industrial Revolution Tools Pre and Post-COVID-19 and the Emergence of ChatGPT

The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments, industry, and educational institutions to deploy digital platforms to minimise disruptions in daily life. Institutions that had adopted Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) tools minimised learning disruptions by quickly migrating to the online environment. 4IR tools include artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, intelligent tutoring and natural language processing systems. Although migrating to the online environment was challenging for most developing countries, COVID-19 offered a rare opportunity to leapfrog into a new digital trajectory. Our study considers COVID-19’s effects on education and the ethical issues arising from adopting 4IR tools and pays particular attention to the impact of ChatGPT. The results show unprecedented and accelerated adoption of 4IR tools during COVID-19 in developed countries while developing countries struggled. We highlight 4IR affordances, constraints and ethical issues. Affordances include independent learning, chatbots, virtual reality and intelligent tutoring systems. Concerns include bias, academic cheating, surveillance, data privacy, and unavailability of policies. 4IR development is private-sector-led; educational institutions and governments need to formulate policies that safeguard the integrity of education. We highlight future scope and opportunities for 4IR tools in education, current limitations and future research trends. We propose a research agenda which evaluates the impact of ChatGPT on education.