AI Ethics: Be Careful What You Wish For! AI and the Dream of Optimizing Student Learning in Higher Education

With the increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in society and the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT, universities worldwide are confronted with making decisions about using AI and analytics techniques to support student learning and teaching.

While the arguments in favor of integrating AI in higher education practices are built on a series of technical and politically speculative promises, using AI in universities raises a series of ethical and moral issues for practitioners in education. Some of these issues take aim at ethical-legal considerations of how student data is collected, by whom, and how higher education institutions use data. Other issues are grounded in more complex normative questions related to the morality of optimizing student learning with unprecedented emerging technologies.

Inspired by critical developments in ethics of care, this talk introduces research and development of AI and learning analytics systems for higher education. It discusses the opportunities and concerns that arise when unprecedented socio-technical phenomena become part of teacher-student relationships.

Bio

Teresa Cerratto Pargman is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) professor at the Dept. of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University (SU). She is also a member of the Executive Committee and Associate Director of Societal Outreach at Digital Futures. Teresa is interested in the increasing digitalization and datafication in higher education from critical perspectives of data and digital technologies. Currently, Teresa is leading the research project Ethical and Legal Challenges in Relationship to AI-Driven Practices In Higher Education, founded by WASP-HS. She is also the PI for the project Exploring Ethics and Values in educational data-driven practices, funded by The Swedish Research Council.

Together with national and international scholars, Teresa has founded the Special Interest group on Responsible Learning Analytics, supported by the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR).