Artificial intelligence in education is often associated today with generative tools such as ChatGPT, but its possibilities extend far beyond conversations between a person and a machine.
The study by Alicia Martínez-De la Muela, Juan Pablo Ruiz-Fuentes, and José Luis González-Geraldo explores precisely another path: the combination of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence in digital higher education through Kampal, a platform that organizes and transforms students’ individual contributions to foster the shared construction of knowledge. The proposal is particularly compelling because it seeks to bring together two trends that do not always advance hand in hand: personalized learning and collaboration among students.
The research uses a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design in a course from an online university master’s degree program. Although 399 students initially participated, the comparative analysis could only be conducted on 25 matched cases across both measurements, a circumstance that calls for caution when interpreting the results. After using Kampal, participants showed significant increases both in their familiarity with the tool and in their willingness to use collective intelligence technologies in the future, with large effect sizes.
However, there were no significant changes in perceptions of its immediate effectiveness or in expectations regarding outcomes. In other words, experimenting with the technology appears to encourage acceptance and spark interest in using it again, but this alone is not enough to show that students immediately perceive an improvement in their learning.
This is probably where one of the study’s most interesting contributions lies. The authors do not present AI-mediated collective intelligence as an automatic solution, but rather as a technology whose educational value depends on pedagogical design and intentional teacher mediation. The fact that a response is the most popular within a group does not necessarily mean that it is the most rigorous, complex, or educationally valuable. Moreover, the algorithms that organize these dynamics may introduce problems of opacity and operate as genuine “black boxes.”
Kampal therefore appears less as a substitute for the teacher than as a tool capable of expanding opportunities for collaboration when expert supervision is in place. Ultimately, the study opens up an especially promising avenue for thinking about educational AI that not only personalizes individual learning, but also helps people build knowledge together.
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How to Cite: Martínez-De la muela, A., Ruiz-Fuentes, J. P., & González-Geraldo, J. L. (2026). Artificial intelligence and collective intelligence in digital higher education: a quasi-experimental study using the Kampal platform. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 29(1), 29–51. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.45560
