Most educational software programs use and gather personal information and metadata from students. Additionally, most of the educational software programs are no longer operated by the learning institutions but are run by third-party agencies. This means that in the decade since 2020, information about students is stored and handled outside premises and control of learning institutions. The personal information about students and their activity while they interact with learning management systems and online learning tools is increasingly in custody of cloud computing platforms, software-as-a-service providers, and learning tool vendors. There is an increasing will to use all the data and metadata from the activity of the students for research, to develop education management strategies, pedagogy approaches, and develop behavior control tools or learning tools informed by behavior analysis from learning analytics. Many times, these studies lack the ethical and moral perspective. In addition, there is an increasing number of cases in which this information has leaked or has been used in a shady way. Additionally, this information will be around for a long time, tied to the future digital profiles of the students whose data has been leaked. This paper hypothesizes that there has been an ongoing process of technological evolution that leads to a loss of control over personal information, which makes it even more difficult to protect user confidentiality and ensuring privacy, that data surveillance has entered the world of education, and that the current legal frameworks are not enough to really protect the student’s personal information. The paper analyzes how this situation came to pass, and why this is wrong. We conclude with some proposals to address it from its different root dimensions: technical, cultural, legal, and organizational.

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into educational environments necessitates a structured framework to ensure its safe and ethical use. A manifesto outlining seven core principles for safe AI in education has been proposed, emphasizing the protection of student data, alignment with institutional strategies, adherence to didactic practices, minimization of errors, comprehensive user interfaces, human oversight, and ethical transparency. These principles are designed to guide the deployment of AI technologies in educational settings, addressing potential risks such as privacy violations, misuse, and over-reliance on technology. Smart Learning Applications (SLApps) are also introduced, integrating AI into the existing institutional technological ecosystem, with special attention to the learning management systems, enabling secure, role-adaptive, and course-specific learning experiences. While large language models like GPT offer transformative potential in education, they also present challenges related to accuracy, ethical use, and pedagogical alignment. To navigate these complexities, a checklist based on the Safe AI in Education principles is recommended, providing educators and institutions with a framework to evaluate AI tools, ensuring they support academic integrity, enhance learning experiences, and uphold ethical standards.

Urban areas can be considered high-potential energy producers alongside their notable portion of energy consumption. Solar energy is the most promising sustainable energy in which urban environments can produce electricity by using rooftop-mounted photovoltaic systems. While the precise knowledge of electricity production from solar energy resources as well as the needed parameters to define the optimal locations require an adequate study, effective guidelines for optimal installation of solar photovoltaics remain a challenge. This paper aims to make a complete systematic review and states the vital steps with their data resources to find the urban rooftop PV potential. Organizing the methodologies is another novelty of this paper to create a complete global basis for future studies and improve a more detailed degree in this particular field.

The privacy policies, terms, and conditions of use in any Learning Management System (LMS) are one-way contracts. The institution imposes clauses that the student can accept or decline. Students, once they accept conditions, should be able to exercise the rights granted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, students cannot object to data processing and public profiling because it would be conceived as an impediment to teachers to execute their work with normality. Nonetheless, regarding GDPR and consulted legal advisors, a student could claim identity anonymization in the LMS, if adequate personal justifications are provided. Per contra, the current LMSs do not have any functionality that enables identity anonymization. This is a big problem that generates undesired situations which urgently requires a definitive solution. In this work, we surveyed students and teachers to validate the feasibility and acceptance of using aliases to anonymize their identity in LMSs as a sustainable solution to the problem. Considering the positive results, we developed a user-friendly plugin for Moodle that enables students’ identity anonymization by the use of aliases. This plugin, presented in this work and named Protected users, is publicly available online at GitHub and published under GNU General Public License.

This paper presents a collaborative learning activity for courses in engineering degrees or master’s programs that cover the subject and skills of sustainability, social compromise, and ethics for engineering. The activity consists of performing a multidisciplinary analysis of a case of study, which presents a technology or innovation, to detect and debate possible issues and solutions. This learning activity is based on the PESTLE methodology that is used to analyze the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental aspects of a technology or innovation. The PESTLE analysis is implemented using the jigsaw collaborative learning technique. This learning activity can be completed in two sessions of two hours. To validate its usefulness, the learning activity was applied for two semesters in a study on two courses: one in Informatics Engineering Degree and the other one in the Master Degree of Sustainability at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, with very good results.

A significant number of universities where engineering is taught, acknowledge the importance of the social and environmental impact of the scientific and technological practice, as well as the ethical problems it presents, and the need to provide their students with courses covering this as a subject. This paper presents 29 years of teaching courses with the subject of social, environmental, and ethical issues to students of Informatics Engineering. The table contents and its evolution over the years will be analyzed, plus the different teaching strategies applied, with emphasis on the collaborative learning methodologies to facilitate critical thinking and debate. During the experience, the course incorporated the subject of History of Informatics which proved to fit in the course. While the subject of Ethics and Sustainability is increasingly being regarded as an important matter to learn by future ICT engineers, the courses covering it remain as optional in the curriculums. This should change.