Research project Ethical and Legal Challenges in Relationship to AI-driven practices in higher education
This project addresses fundamental ethical and legal challenges that AI technologies bring to learning and teaching in higher education. It will provide knowledge about how to conceptually and empirically approach these challenges, but most importantly: How to deal with ethical issues in practice.
Recent technical developments have suggested using artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand and optimize student learning, ensure improvements in educational quality, and boost retention rates.
These unprecedented technical and research developments promise to unlock the black box of student learning and to inform educational institutions about the complexities of educational processes. But the use of student data and analytics techniques also raises a series of issues that require ethical and legal considerations.
Currently, there is little understanding of ethics concerning deploying AI in the education sector. This is partly due to the scant attention that ethical concerns have received compared to such systems' increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
This project addresses fundamental ethical and legal challenges that AI technologies bring to learning and teaching in higher education. It will contribute with knowledge about how to conceptually and empirically approach these challenges, but most importantly how to deal with ethical issues in practice.
Grounded in post-phenomenological investigations of human-technology relations, this project will contribute to a relational, dynamic, and situated understanding of ethics in everyday education. Bringing together direct and indirect educational stakeholders, the project aims to raise awareness towards the responsible use of AI in higher education.
Project description
The project is grounded in postphenomenological investigations of human-technology relations (Verbeek, 2005). We approach technologies in terms of the relations between human beings and technological artefacts, focusing on the various ways that technologies shape relations between humans and the world, identifying the roles that technologies play in such relations, and analyzing the implications of these roles for human–technology relations.
Studies conducted within the postphenomenological tradition always include empirical work as human–technology relations are better understood from empirical accounts of technologies’ roles in human experience and practices. Postphenomenology provides a philosophical lens to understand that technologies do more than simply function; they transform our experiences and translate our actions; most importantly, they mediate human–world relations (Aagaard, 2017).
The structure of such relations is often described in terms of Idhe’s (Ihde, 1995) four basic forms of technological mediations: embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations (Rosenberger and Verbeek, 2015). Such mediations provide educational technology scientists, legal informatics, and computer science researchers, with a lens to engage with ethics regarding the spaces of possibilities that AI-based applications set up in learning and teaching practices in the HE context.
Research questions
The following research questions are motivated by the lack of work conducted on the ethics of Learning Analytics tools from relational understandings of justice and care (Prinsloo and Slade, 2017). The following research questions come to fill this knowledge gap.
RQ1: How do students/teachers/higher education (HE) institutions view ethical practices in HE, and what do they mean for them concerning emerging AI-driven practices?
RQ2: What roles do learning analytics tools play in educational relationships, and what are the implications of these roles and technological mediations for the educational stakeholders’ understandings of justice and care in HE practices?
RQ3: How can we (direct and indirect educational stakeholders) harness the potential of learning analytics systems for novel ways of learning and teaching while at the same time cultivating just and caring educational practices in HE?
These research questions are most relevant today as we approach artificial intelligence technologies that are expected to have a large socioeconomic impact on the education sector. These technologies are new (employ new concepts, methods), innovative (they promise new and potentially superior solutions to problems), and most importantly, are still under development (they are not fully developed). This condition of being “in-the-making” opens an opportunity to influence the design and use of Responsible AI in higher education.
Project members
Project managers
Teresa Cerratto-Pargman
Professor
Members
Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg
Professor
Cormac McGrath
Senior lecturer
Liane Rose Colonna
Ass. lektor, docent
Elin Sporrong
PhD student
Chantal Mutimukwe
Senior lecturer
Alexandra Farazouli
PhD student
Jaakko Hollmén
Senior lecturer
Clàudia Figueras Julián
Doktorand
Johanna Velander