Reinforcement Learning in Education 4.0: Open Applications and Deployment Challenges

Education 4.0 involves adopting technology in teaching and learning to drive innovation and growth across academic institutions. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are frontrunners in Education 4.0, having already impacted diverse sectors globally. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the conventional method of teaching and learning has become unpopular among institutions and is currently being replaced with intelligent educational data pattern identification and online learning. The teacher-centred pedagogical paradigm has significantly shifted to a learner-centred pedagogy with the emergence of Education 4.0. Reinforcement Learning has been deployed successfully in diverse sectors, and the educational domain should not be an exemption. This survey discusses Reinforcement Learning, a feedback-based machine learning technique, with application modules in the academic field. Each module is analysed for the state-action-reward implementation policies with relevant features that define individual use cases. The survey primarily examined the classroom, admission, e-learning, library and game development modules. In addition, the survey heightened the foreseeable challenges in the real-world deployment of Reinforcement Learning in educational institutions.