Ethical and Legal Challenges in Relationship to AI-Driven Practices in Higher Education

Recent developments have suggested ways of using AI to understand better and optimize student learning, ensure improvements in educational quality, and boost retention rates.

While 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, the use of student data and analytics techniques raises a series of issues that require ethical and legal considerations. However, there is currently little understanding of ethics in relation to deploying AI in the education sector. This is partly due to the scant attention that ethical concerns have received compared to the increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness of such systems.

This project addresses fundamental ethical and legal challenges that AI technologies bring to learning and teaching in higher education. It will contribute 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 responsible use of AI by setting up the Swedish Ethical Observatory for AI in higher education.