Welcome to Responsible learning analytics: creating just, ethical, and caring LA systems by Cerratto Pargman, McGrath, Viberg, Kitto, Knight & Ferguson.
Prof. Rebecca Ferguson's Keynote: Towards Trustworthy Analytics
Ethical considerations and the values embedded in the design, development, deployment and use of Learning Analytics (LA) systems have received considerable attention in recent years. Ethical frameworks, design guidelines, principles, checklists, and a code of practice have contributed a conceptual basis for focused discussions on ethics in LA. However, relatively little is known about how these different conceptual understandings of ethics work in practice and what specific tensions practitioners (e.g., administrators, developers, researchers, teachers, learners) experience when designing, deploying, or using LA with care.
This interactive workshop aims to provide participants with a space for information, dialogue, and collaboration around Responsible LA. The workshop will begin with a brief overview of Responsible LA. After that, the participants will present their cases drawing attention to the ethical considerations covered and not covered in LA practices. Following this, participants in groups will discuss the cases illustrating ethical tensions and create semantic categories to document such edge cases. The collected edge cases will be shared in a wiki or database. The workshop outcomes will help inform LA practitioners on ethical tensions that need to be discussed with care while highlighting places where more research work is required.
Workshop goals
Introducing "Responsible LA" via concepts and sensitivities coming from the fields of Science & Technology Studies (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2011) and Human-computer interaction (Buckingham Shum et al., 2019; D'Ignazio & Klein, 2019).
By Responsible LA, we refer to the need to create LA systems that are just and ethical but also that consider equity, democratic and solidarity in education.
Promoting discussions on the ethics of data-driven practices from the ground aimed to inform practitioners on the ethical challenges that emerge in practice.
Creating a wiki or other type of artifact contributing to a repository of ethical practice, as suggested by Kiitto and Knight (2019).
Helping participants to reflect on ethical challenges that speak of a disconnect between research and practice and find research collaboration opportunities.
The workshop outcomes will advance the LA field by informing the community on ethical challenges encountered in practice (during the development, design, and/or use of LA systems).
One concrete outcome of the workshop will be starting an artifact (e.g., wiki) to document edge ethical cases in general terms, not linked to particular individuals or institutions that will be shared in the community for reflective discussions and further study.