International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2022) 32:501–503

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-022-00299-x

EDITORIAL

Introduction to IJAIED Special Issue, FATE in AIED

Beverly Woolf1

Published online: 8 August 2022

© The Author(s) 2022

Summer 2021.
This special issue of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Educa-
tion (IJAIED) on fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics (FATE) in AIED
was written during the lockdown of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Teachers from
elementary school to higher education bravely switched to online learning and video
conferencing for more than a year. Educational results were mixed and exacerbated
existing inequities in education. Students from more affluent communities fared well
if they maintained connectivity, received parental support, and kept up with online
classes. Other students experienced great educational losses, especially if they were
special education students, had limited technological access, lived in less affluent,
rural, or underrepresented communities, or had parents unable to provide support.
The pandemic simultaneously demonstrated the potentials of technology-enhanced
learning and its ethical challenges.
This special issue of IJAIED is motivated by the growing number of students
who are impacted by online education and thus by algorithmic systems encoded in
instructional systems. As AIED researchers and practitioners, we unleashed AI-based
educational technologies into the world, and in several cases are now witnessing their
widespread adoption. It is incumbent upon us to address the ethical implications of
AIED’s continued growth, both in the near and far term.
Ethical dimensions exist in the design, development and deployment of real
world and high stakes AI systems, e.g., automated hiring and recidivism prediction.
Research is focused on social implications of AI development and use. Yet despite
this widespread attention, issues of FATE are rarely discussed within AIED and
neighboring educational technology research communities. Despite concerns about
AI’s growing influence over human decision-making and functioning – most debates

Beverly Woolf
bev@cs.umass.edu

1
Lowell, United States

13
502 International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2022) 32:501–503

and guidelines related to FATE of AI do not deeply engage with issues of human
cognition, learning, and development.
Additionally, no framework has been devised, no guidelines agreed upon, no
policies developed, and no regulations enacted to address the specific ethical issues
raised by the use of AI in education (Holmes et al., 2018).
As a young field we have a lot to learn. For example, how should educational data
be analyzed, interpreted, shared and acted upon? How should we understand and
mitigate harmful biases in data? What are the ethical consequences of encouraging
students to work independently with AI-supported systems? How do we prevent and
ameliorate conscious or unconscious biases on the civil rights of individual students?
How does the transient nature of student goals, interests and emotions impact the
ethics of AIED? Given that the scale of online learning in the coming years is likely
to amplify any design biases (e.g., about gender, age, race, social. status, income
inequality), these questions begin to address only a few of the ‘known unknowns’
of ethics in AIED. This field must also focus on the ‘unknown unknowns’, e.g., the
ethical issues raised by AIED that have yet to be identified (Holmes et al., this Special
Issue). For example, any sufficient framework for ethics of AIED needs to include
insights from the learning sciences, cognitive and educational neuroscience and from
fields whose true impact has not yet been felt in education technology. AIED is a
design discipline, not solely an empirical science and it will take years to design
necessary and sufficient AIED systems. Focusing now on development of a useful
framework for the ethics of AI in education, although desirable and potentially use-
ful, is challenging and requires many years of focus. Any ethics framework needs to
support a degree of flexibility to incorporate new knowledge, new understandings
and new ways of supporting learning and teaching, as our science, socio-cultural
norms, values, and educational systems emerge and adapt in the future.
This special issue provides a snapshot of current research on FATE in AIED. The
first two papers explore the AIED Community, frameworks and policies. The first
paper, “Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-wide Framework,” sum-
marizes a survey of community researchers with the goal of understanding what it
means to be ethical in designing and implementing virtual instructional systems and
to make ethical pedagogical choices. “Education for AI, not AI for Education: The
Role of Education and Ethics in National AI Policy Strategies” examines AIED from
a political perspective and articulates how 24 nations describe their AI policy strate-
gies. Most countries’ plans focus on developing an AI-ready workforce rather than
on the general use of AI in education. The next two papers examine students’ consent
around data. “Disparities in Students’ Propensity to Consent to Learning Analytics”
discusses whether and how to provide students with agency regarding their own data
collection and found that consent and institutional trust differ for underrepresented
minorities. “Data-related Ethics Issues in Technologies for Informal Professional
Learning” formulates a vision to address data-related ethics issues in professional
learning and notes that examining adult learners must include (possibly private) data
about colleagues, customers, or clients.
The next four papers explore ethics in AIED once systems are deployed in real-
world contexts. “Equality of Learning Opportunity via Individual Fairness in Per-
sonalized Recommendations” describes how to ethically provide learners with

13
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2022) 32:501–503 503

recommendations for learning and uncovers systematic inequalities within a very

large educational recommender system. “Context Matters: Differing Implications
of Motivation and Help-Seeking in Educational Technology” examines the problem
of recovering diversity demographics across a variety of instructional modules in
an attempt to understand the role of social factors and motivation-related behaviors
that appears to be highly variable among groups. “Exploring Teachers’ Perceptions
of Artificial Intelligence via Individual Fairness in Personalized Recommendations
Education” demonstrates that although Estonian teachers have limited knowledge
about AI, they perceive it as an opportunity for education and propose to, for exam-
ple, use AI to support teachers to access and use multilingual content. “Advancing
the Design and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence in Education through Con-
tinuous Improvement” argues that instructional systems need to be adapted to their
local contexts and requires promotion of systematic inquiry and collaboration among
educators, developers, and researchers.
Finally, the last two papers in this special issue explore how to teaching ethical AI
and provide approaches for effectively educating relevant stakeholders. “Teaching
Responsible Data Science: Charting New Pedagogical Territory” describes devel-
opment and teaching of a technical course focused on responsible data science and
provides emerging best practices for teaching data science and AI courses, including
algorithmic development and data analysis. “Educating Software and AI Stakehold-
ers About Algorithmic Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics” discusses
topics in a course intended for consumers of educational materials (including com-
mercial developers) and surveys past experiences, noting the scarcity of suitable
materials; it uses a college admission platform as an example to illustrate its ideas.
Collectively, these articles represent a call to action for the community to act on
ethical requirements in AIED. It is critical that the education research community
explore what fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics mean for technology-
supported education. Such critical appraisal is key to enhancing our future under-
standing of FATE of AI in online education, building on knowledge gleaned from
years of AIED and educational technology research.
Beverly Woolf, Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, Wayne Holmes, Ken Holstein
Special Editors
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

13