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Developing a Professional Profile of a Digital Ethics Officer in an Educational Technology Unit in Higher Education

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Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing the Learner and Teacher Experience (HCII 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13328))

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Abstract

The digitalisation of learning, teaching, and study processes has a major impact on possible evaluations and uses of data, for example with regard to individual learning recommendations, prognosis, or assessments. This also gives rise to ethical issues centered around digital teaching and possible challenges of data use. One possible approach to this challenge might be to install a Digital Ethics Officer (DEO), whose future profile this paper outlines for a Educational Technology unit of a Higher Education Institution (HEI). Therefore, an introductory overview of the tasks and roles of Ethics Officers (EO) is given based on the literature. The authors then describe the current ethics program of a university of technology and collect current and potential ethical issues from the field of educational technologies. Based on this, a first professional profile for a DEO at an educational technology unit of a university is described. From the authors’ point of view, the article thus prepares important considerations and steps for the future of this position.

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Acknowledgements

Contributions and development were partly delivered within the project “Learning Analytics: Effects of data analysis on learning success” (01/2020-12/2021) with TU Graz and University of Graz as partners and the Province of Styria as funding body (12. Zukunftsfonds Steiermark). We would also like to thank Armin Spök and Günter Getzinger from the Science, Technology and Society Unit at TU Graz for their helpful comments and feedback on our work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    David Andrews, Philipp Leitner & Martin Ebner

  2. Universitas Negeri Malang, Malang, East Java, Indonesia

    Sandra Schön

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Correspondence to David Andrews .

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  1. Department of Multimedia and Graphic Art, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Panayiotis Zaphiris

  2. Research Center on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (CYENS), Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Andri Ioannou

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Andrews, D., Leitner, P., Schön, S., Ebner, M. (2022). Developing a Professional Profile of a Digital Ethics Officer in an Educational Technology Unit in Higher Education. In: Zaphiris, P., Ioannou, A. (eds) Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing the Learner and Teacher Experience. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13328. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05657-4_12

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