The heart of educational data infrastructures = Conscious humanity and scientific responsibility, not infinite data and limitless experimentation

Abstract

Education and education research are experiencing increased digitization and datafication, partly thanks to the rise in popularity of massively open online courses (MOOCs). The infrastructures that collect, store and analyse the resulting big data have received critical scrutiny from sociological, epistemological, ethical and analytical perspectives. These critiques tend to highlight concerns and/or warnings about the lack of the infrastructures' and builders' understanding of various nontechnical aspects of big data research (eg seeing data as neutral rather than as products of social processes). These critiques have primarily come from outside of the builder community, rendering the conversation largely one‐sided and devoid of the voices of the builders themselves. The purpose of this paper is to re‐balance the conversation by reporting the results of interviews with 11 data infrastructure builders in higher education institutions. The interviews reveal that builders engage deeply with the issues the critiques outline, not only thinking about them, but also developing practices to address them. The paper focuses the findings on three themes: designing a productive science, navigating ubiquitous ethics and achieving real human impact. Researchers, policymakers and infrastructure builders can use these accounts to better understand the building process and experience.

Supporting and challenging learners through pedagogical agents: Addressing ethical issues through designing for values

“…Dealing with these conflicts of interest and protection of the rights of vulnerable people such as children and the mentally disabled, will need carefully designed standards and legislation. Further discussion of data privacy will be left to other articles in this special issue whose focus is on learning analytics (Johanes & Thille,; Kitto & Knight, ; Prinsloo, ; Tsai, Poquet, Gaševid, Dawson, & Pardo, ; Williamson, ).…”

Learning analytics and AI: Politics, pedagogy and practices

“…We explicitly called for insider accounts from system builders regarding the assumptions they make about “politics, pedagogy and practices.” In “The heart of educational data infrastructures = conscious humanity and scientific responsibility, not infinite data and limitless experimentation,” Johanes and Thille () describe not their own system building efforts, but the insights they gained from in‐depth interviews with 11 data infrastructure teams building LA/AIED systems. The authors seek to give these teams a voice, to rebalance concerns that technologists do not care about ethics, or even if they do, they cannot translate this into design decisions.…”

“…We were also keen for clarifications of the way that the three elements of our theme: Politics, Pedagogy and Practices are deeply connected and inter-related (cf. Johanes & Thille, 2019;Kitto & Knight, 2019).…”

Critical Data Studies, Abstraction & Learning Analytics

“…In my view, data, analytics, visualizations, automated actions -all are designed -and reflective infrastructure designers are acutely aware of the implications of their work. Significantly, they are beginning to document how they navigate the dilemma of designing with imperfect technology (e.g., Johanes & Thille, 2019;Kitto, Buckingham Shum, & Gibson, 2018;Richards & Dignum, 2019). It seems to me, therefore, that to declare that LA infrastructure has intrinsically destructive cognitive, social, educational, or political affordances is no less than a capitulation to the status quo, handing over the reins of these new tools to those with much power, but less understanding of learning and teaching.…”