While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context.
This paper argues that the research field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) can benefit from integrating recent technological advances (e.g., wearable devices, big data processing, 3D modelling, 3D printing, ambient intelligence) and design methodologies, such as TORMES, when developing systems that address the psychomotor learning domain. In particular, the acquisition of motor skills could benefit from individualized instruction and support just as cognitive skills learning has over the last decades. To this point, procedural learning has been considered since the earliest days of AIED (dating back to the 1980’s). However, AIED developments in motor skills learning have lagged significantly behind. As technology has evolved, and supported by the do-it-yourself and quantified-self movements, it is now possible to integrate emerging interactive technologies in order to provide personal awareness and reflection for behavioural change at low cost and with low intrusion. Many activities exist that would benefit from personalizing motor skills learning, such as playing a musical instrument, handwriting, drawing, training for surgery, improving the technique in sports and martial arts, learning sign language, dancing, etc. In this context, my suggestions for AIED research in the coming 25 years focus on addressing challenges regarding 1) modelling the psychomotor interaction, and 2) providing appropriate personalized psychomotor support.
We report current findings when considering video recordings of facial expressions and body movements to provide affective personalized support in an educational context from an enriched multimodal emotion detection approach. In particular, we describe an annotation methodology to tag facial expression and body movements that conform to changes in the affective states of learners while dealing with cognitive tasks in a learning process. The ultimate goal is to combine these annotations with additional affective information collected during experimental learning sessions from different sources such as qualitative, self-reported, physiological, and behavioral information. These data altogether are to train data mining algorithms that serve to automatically identify changes in the learners’ affective states when dealing with cognitive tasks which help to provide emotional personalized support.