The recent eruption of artificial intelligence (AI) into the public discourse -in line with this year’s conference theme “Learning Analytics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”- has prompted many questions about its impact on education (including issues of assessment, accountability, and literacies). These new questions, along with long-standing issues like fairness and bias in machine learning and AI as well as other ethics and privacy issues are pushing the learning analytics (LA) community to call for a more humane alignment of the LA systems we design (e.g., the notion of human-centered LA, see Buckingham Shum et al., 2019). However, in LA research and practice we have not systematically and explicitly taken such goals and values into account, with only a few examples available (Campos et al., 2023; Chen & Zhu, 2019). Luckily, we can turn to other fields that have been working on frameworks and methods to both model and investigate the goals, needs and values of groups and individuals, at different levels.

From the field of cross-cultural psychology, it is now well-established that culture is a primary way in which certain values are reflected. One of the ways to examine and understand culture is through its values. Cultural values are understood as “collective tendencies to prefer a certain course of events above another, expressed by qualifications such as good and bad, dirty and clear, ugly and beautiful” (Hofstede et al., 2010). According to Viberg et al. (2023), the values emphasized in a society may be “the most central feature of culture” (Schwartz, 2006, p. 139) as these values describe a shared understanding of what society views as good, right and desirable (Williams, 1970). For example, if a society values success and ambition, this might be reflected in “a highly competitive economic system [...] and child-rearing practices that pressure children to achieve” (Schwartz, 2006, p. 139). In an educational setting, such an environment might foster competition among students as ‘being better than your peers’ defines a successful learner, encouraging the use of social comparison features in the design of LA dashboards (Jivet et al., 2017). It is also well established in psychology that values, i.e., what a person considers important in life, are also a key motivational construct at the individual level, related to well-being, planned behavior (including learning behavior) and even neural correlates (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022).

In the field of human-computer interaction, building on this rich social sciences research background, value-sensitive design (VSD) has been proposed as “a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner” (Friedman et al., 2017). Yet, VSD is more than a philosophy, and it has developed specific methods to consider human values (e.g., privacy, trust, and autonomy) in a systematic fashion throughout system design and research processes. Thus, VSD holds great potential as a concrete way to consider cultural aspects and individual values in LA (Chen & Zhu, 2019; Viberg et al., 2023). The main expected benefits of using VSD in LA include: making LA more relevant to a wider range of stakeholders and facilitating (and understanding) the transfer of LA innovations to new contexts and across cultures.

This workshop aims to both popularize VSD in learning analytics and help participants incorporate such methods (and cultural and individual value considerations more generally) into LA design and research processes. The workshop builds upon two previously separate workshop series at the LAK and EC-TEL conferences (workshop names blinded for review), thus combining the efforts, contents, and experiences for both of those aspects to provide workshop participants with the best of both. 

The workshop will take the form of a “design challenge” where participants join in small teams to de-construct and re-design specific LA systems, or to plan cross-cultural LA studies, with non-expositional scaffolding from the organizers.

Before the workshop

• Please register for the workshop during your LAK24 conference registration, or add it to your existing registration (this is important! the workshop may be cancelled if there are not enough registrations)

• If applicable, please propose a "case study" (using this form) for the design challenge part of the workshop, i.e., an LA tool or research study you would like to (re-)design taking culture and values into account. If you just want to learn about culture and values in LA but don't have a clear case of application, just skip this step.

• Express your interest in the "case studies" proposed by you or other participants (you will receive an email about this before the workshop event)

During the workshop

1. Introduction

   • What do we mean by “culture” and “values”?

   • Frameworks for cultural and individual value investigation

   • Value sensitive design (VSD) and its applicability in LA design and research

2. Guided exploration of value-sensitive design methods (group work)

   • Becoming knowledgeable about a VSD methods

   • Application of the VSD methods to a facilitator-proposed case study

3. ☕️ Coffee Break ☕️

4. Design Sprint: (re-)designing an LA technology/study (group work)

   • Informal presentation of participant-proposed case studies

   • Deconstructing, redesigning and evaluating the case studies (structured collaborative activities)

5. Wrap-Up

   • Future work of the work groups on their projects

   • Potential outlets: Special issue on VSD at BJET

After the workshop

• Continue working with your group on your design challenge tool/study.

• If applicable, submit a paper to the upcoming Special Section on VSD at the British Journal of Educational Technology.

• EC-TEL 2023, September 4-8, Aveiro, Portugal

  • Value-Sensitive Design Methods for TEL (VSD4TEL)

  • 5th Workshop on Culturally Aware Learning Analytics (CARLA)

• LAK 2023, March 13-17, Arlington, Texas, USA

  • cancelled

• EC-TEL 2022, September 12-16, Toulouse, France

• LAK 2022, March 21-25, online

  • Invited keynote: Rene Kizilcec, Cornell University

• EC-TEL 2021, September 20-24, online

  • Invited keynote: Rene Kizilcec, Cornell University