Briefing report No. 6
by the European Digital Education Hub’s squad on artificial intelligence in education Authors: Elise Rondin, Francisco Bellas, Martina Weber, Petra Bevek, Bertine van Deyzen, Jessica Niewint-Gori, Cristina Obae, Anne Gilleran and Lidija Kralj.

The issues linked to ethics of AI, the right to privacy, data protection, gender inequality or human rights, are also present in the education sector, where the population is often more vulnerable, notably due to a young age and a lack of understanding. Therefore, it is highly important to put in place and implement legal safeguards and technical norms for the ethical use of AI in education, to ensure that its use does not violate rights of students, teachers and other people in the educational sphere. If this duty must be mainly the responsibility of the states, other actors, including schools, teachers as well as tech companies have an important role to play. Ensuring that students are aware of these issues is also important for them to understand how AI systems work and what their risks are.

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Briefing report ends with Recommendations by the Squad

Caution should be a keyword at every level in using AI in education. Students need to be taught their rights and how to protect themselves, teachers need to be cognisant of the range of information collected in the AI tools they use, developers need to guard against undue influence and be aware of potential bias, and finally governmental bodies need to take a firm position with robust legislations to protect their citizens while excising a rigorous approach to their own use of AI in data collection.
In general, we recommend the following learning goals related to AI literacy and ethics:

• Identify and analyse the ethical and environmental opportunities and threats
  arising from the everyday use of AI.
• Promote a safe, responsible and conscious use of digital tools and technologies
  related to AI.
• Analyse and understand the human footprint and the influence of risks in automated decision-making processes.
• Identify and evaluate the ethical and policy implications of the design and use of AI systems, including fairness, bias, discrimination and accountability.
• Critically analyse the potential of AI to improve peoples’ quality of life, assessing
  its operability in different social, economic and cultural contexts.
• Know and understand the risks and benefits of AI in different areas, such as health, security and privacy.

Read whole report No. 6 “AI and Ethics, Human Rights, Law and Educational Data” and find all other briefing reports by European Digital Education Hub’s squad on artificial intelligence in education in the post “Learning journey for, about, and with AI“.
We also invite you to join the European Digital Education Hub.