Digital Ethics in Higher Education

    The topic for this discussion post will be digital ethics in higher education.  As nearly every facet of life has moved to the internet, the more our lives are shaped and guided by the information being presented. The ways this information is being served to us is not without bias, even in education.   Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are newer technologies being introduced as game changing and disruptive to current practices.  In many ways they are, but users and programmers must be aware of how those technologies are developed, in order that we may identify potential forms of bias in the programming algorithms or data used to train the algorithm.   Bias in algorithms sets the tone and steers the results of a program or AI by setting values on attributes provided by data received by the system.  Things like how the program responds to a gender input, age, race, social attribute can be used to generate a pretrained response method for interacting with those users’ data.    In addition, with the constant growth in surveillance and identity recognition systems and software, the amount of data which can be used to base automated value judgements has grown beyond the comprehension of general application users despite posted disclaimers from within the applications themselves. 

    Forces that impact this trend have been COVID-19 and an economy of convenience. With the spread of COVID-19, education has transitioned from in-person to online or hybrid learning platforms.  The immediate convenience for those who could afford to immediately move to online learning, more rapidly than others provided their children with an advantage over others who were less able to adapt to the changes.  In moving to strictly digital learning, student performance data, video attendance, and massive amounts of potentially marketable digital content is constantly flowing between students, teachers, and administrators alike in forms which can be collected and fed into private, government, or commercial AI platforms for analysis.      

    The recent proliferation of online learning throughout higher education and K-12 schools has enabled the expansion of AI and machine learning into the school system at an exponential pace. For example, Georgia Tech's plan for 2040—Deliberate Innovation, Lifetime Education—is a deeply technology-rich vision of higher education, focusing on a new kind of learner by deploying online learning, blockchain, microcredentials, analytics-rich advising, "personalization at scale," and advanced AI systems (O’Brien, 2020).  MIT President L. Rafael Reif also underscored the ethical focus of the college: "Technological advancements must go hand in hand with the development of ethical guidelines that anticipate the risks of such enormously powerful innovations (O’Brien, 2020).  Another daunting reality is the simple fact that at about the time we have fully wrapped our minds around the current set of worries, pitfalls, outrages, and solutions, there will be a new set of digital ethics quandaries before us (O’Brien, 2020).  

 O’Brien, J., Digital Ethics in Higher Education: 2020, May 2020, Retrieved from Educase: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/5/digital-ethics-in-higher-education-2020