How can Generative AI Support Education?

The possible applications of GenAI (Generative AI) in education alone are so manyfold and overwhelming that it is useful to have an overview of the many possibilities that are opening up. In this paper, we try to organize some of the low-hanging fruits that can help instructors, learners, and educational managers use GenAI applications to improve educational performance. For instructors, GenAI can help in gaining a deeper understanding of the topics to be taught, preparing educational materials, and facilitating the enactment phase in class. Learners can be assisted in getting personalized content and feedback, having GenAI as a participant in forums, or for self-reflection and emotions detection. Managers and other stakeholders can profit from Academic Analytics, bias detection, course repurposing, and many other uses. In this paper, we also present a use case detailing some initial actions we are implementing for a Programming with Java course. One action is to explicitly identify, in each problem set, the competencies being developed. Another one is the development of a chatbot, fine-tuned with the course material, which can be used by students as a tutor. The third action is to use a GenAI tool to generate questions aimed at assessing whether students truly grasp the programming project they have supposedly developed. AI is here to stay, in spite of the issues it opens up, and therefore it is never too early to start experimenting with it in practice.