“…2. Commitment to public service: professions involve a public declaration to provide a service to society or for the public good, making use of specialized, often privileged expertise 65 that takes precedence over individual gain 51 . 3.…”
Section: Box 1 | Characteristics Of a Formal Professionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…4. Enforcement and self-governance: often, these standards are recorded in an ethical code and enforced through a disciplinary system, administered by professional associations 63,65 . 5.…”
Section: Box 1 | Characteristics Of a Formal Professionmentioning
“…2. Commitment to public service: professions involve a public declaration to provide a service to society or for the public good, making use of specialized, often privileged expertise 65 that takes precedence over individual gain 51 . 3.…”
Section: Box 1 | Characteristics Of a Formal Professionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…4. Enforcement and self-governance: often, these standards are recorded in an ethical code and enforced through a disciplinary system, administered by professional associations 63,65 . 5.…”
Section: Box 1 | Characteristics Of a Formal Professionmentioning
“…Questions have been raised about the utility of codes of conduct in changing the practice of those building software systems. Indeed, McNamara, Smith, and Murphy‐Hill () recently demonstrated that the ACM code of ethics (https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics, see Anderson, ) had no discernible impact upon the decisions made by 63 software engineering students and 105 professional software developers in responding to a set of 11 ethical vignettes. It is likely that similar results would be found for the many checklists and best practice approaches that have been proposed in LA, although this is an area where well‐grounded research is desperately required.…”
Section: A Need For Practical Ethics In Lamentioning
confidence: 99%
“…An important extension to this approach would include linking these edge cases to notable public stories or disciplinary action that has occurred in various domains when practitioners fail to adapt to public norms about what is ethical. As McNamara et al () have put it:one effective way to influence ethical decision making in software development is to help developers see the connections between the consequences of their decisions and examples of similar newsworthy decisions. (p. 732)…”
Section: System Builders Must “Join the Fray”mentioning
Artificial intelligence and data analysis (AIDA) are increasingly entering the field of education. Within this context, the subfield of learning analytics (LA) has, since its inception, had a strong emphasis upon ethics, with numerous checklists and frameworks proposed to ensure that student privacy is respected and potential harms avoided. Here, we draw attention to some of the assumptions that underlie previous work in ethics for LA, which we frame as three tensions. These assumptions have the potential of leading to both the overcautious underuse of AIDA as administrators seek to avoid risk, or the unbridled misuse of AIDA as practitioners fail to adhere to frameworks that provide them with little guidance upon the problems that they face in building LA for institutional adoption. We use three edge cases to draw attention to these tensions, highlighting places where existing ethical frameworks fail to inform those building LA solutions. We propose a pilot open database that lists edge cases faced by LA system builders as a method for guiding ethicists working in the field towards places where support is needed to inform their practice. This would provide a middle space where technical builders of systems could more deeply interface with those concerned with policy, law and ethics and so work towards building LA that encourages human flourishing across a lifetime of learning.
What is already known about this topic
Applied ethics has a number of well‐established theoretical groundings that we can use to frame the actions of ethical agents, including, deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics.
Learning analytics has developed a number of checklists, frameworks and evaluation methodologies for supporting trusted and ethical development, but these are often not adhered to by practitioners.
Laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) apply to fields like education, but the complexity of this field can make them difficult to apply.
What this paper adds
Evidence of tensions and gaps in existing ethical frameworks and checklists to support the ethical development and implementation of learning analytics.
A set of three edge cases that demonstrate places where existing work on the ethics of AI in education has failed to provide guidance.
A “practical ethics” conceptualisation that draws on virtue ethics to support practitioners in building learning analytics systems.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Those using AIDA in education should collect and share example edge cases to support development of practical ethics in the field.
A multiplicity of ethical approaches are likely to be useful in understanding how to develop and implement learning analytics ethically in practical contexts.
“…In doing so, they build their own values into the systems, which end up reflecting their views [1]. It is known that developers are not well-informed and aware of ethics [2]. Combined with the current lack of tools to support ethical AI development, this results in a situation where developers do not have the necessary means to tackle potential ethical issues, or even recognize them during development.…”
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in human contexts calls for ethical considerations for the design and development of AI-based systems. However, little knowledge currently exists on how to provide useful and tangible tools that could help software developers and designers implement ethical considerations into practice. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a method that enables ethically aligned design in a decision-making process. Though this method, titled the RESOLVEDD strategy, originates from the field of business ethics, it is being applied in other fields as well. We tested the RESOLVEDD strategy in a multiple case study of five student projects where the use of ethical tools was given as one of the design requirements. A key finding from the study indicates that simply the presence of an ethical tool has an effect on ethical consideration, creating more responsibility even in instances where the use of the tool is not intrinsically motivated.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
