The Future of Education

The use of learning analytics (LA) and artificial intelligence (AI) in Higher Education become a widely discussed topic with continued high relevance in Germany. LA- and AI-supported machine learning will become more important in the organization and teaching of universities and higher education institutions. It will significantly influence the learning structure of students and determine the design of universities in the coming decades1. Questions concerning the participation of students and teachers in this development as well as the elaboration of ethical guidelines received little attention in the discourse2. In this article, we address the problem of the lacking participation from students in the discussion of using AI and LA in universities. As a solution we present a virtual reality supported moral machine, in which possible scenarios of future AI university developments are given. The technical development core is a moral machine based on virtual reality application, which is developed in cooperation with the research team KI in der Hochschullehre and students from the subject media production of the Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe in Lemgo, Germany. The moral machine shows the users various exemplary scenarios in which AI an LA could be used in future university teaching contexts and asks the user for an ethical assessment for each scenario. Students deal with the topic of AI at universities through the insight of virtual reality and can evaluate the possible AI scenario of the future. The results of the evaluation provide information about which forms of LA and AI are ethically acceptable for students. Based on this information we will design an ethical guideline catalogue for using AI and LA in universities.

Keywords: future scenario, moral machine, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, higher education.

References:
[1] C. Büching, D.-K. Mah, S. Otto, P. Paulicke & E. Hartman (2019). Learning Analytics an Hochschulen. In: V. Wittpahl (Eds.), Künstliche Intelligenz: Technologie, Anwendung, Gesellschaft (pp.142-160). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. 
[2] K. Kieslich, M. Lünich, F. Marcinkowski & C. Starke (2019). Hochschule der Zukunft - Einstellungen von Studierenden gegenüber Künstlicher Intelligenz an der Hochschule, Düsseldorf. 2019.