Equality of Learning Opportunity via Individual Fairness in Personalized Recommendations

Online education platforms play an increasingly important role in mediating the success of individuals’ careers. Therefore, while building overlying content recommendation services, it becomes essential to guarantee that learners are provided with equal recommended learning opportunities, according to the platform principles, context, and pedagogy. Though the importance of ensuring equality of learning opportunities has been well investigated in traditional institutions, how this equality can be operationalized in online learning ecosystems through recommender systems is still under-explored. In this paper, we shape a blueprint of the decisions and processes to be considered in the context of equality of recommended learning opportunities, based on principles that need to be empirically-validated (no evaluation with live learners has been performed). To this end, we first provide a formalization of educational principles that model recommendations’ learning properties, and a novel fairness metric that combines them to monitor the equality of recommended learning opportunities among learners. Then, we envision a scenario wherein an educational platform should be arranged in such a way that the generated recommendations meet each principle to a certain degree for all learners, constrained to their individual preferences. Under this view, we explore the learning opportunities provided by recommender systems in a course platform, uncovering systematic inequalities. To reduce this effect, we propose a novel post-processing approach that balances personalization and equality of recommended opportunities. Experiments show that our approach leads to higher equality, with a negligible loss in personalization. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for future studies of learners’ preferences and limits concerning the equality of recommended learning opportunities

Defining and Evaluating Equitable Partnerships: A Rapid Review

Equitable partnerships are central to the GCRF portfolio overall, the interdisciplinary hubs, and specifically to the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub. Achieving the Hub’s aim of catalysing a transition from crisis management to multi-hazard risk-informed and inclusive planning for cities in low-and-middle income countries, is not possible without working through equitable partnerships with a diverse set of actors. Simply delivering the results of multi-hazard risk research is not sufficient to tackle the interactable challenge of risk governance. It requires working directly with decision makers, planners, civil society and communities within cities and beyond, and doing so in a way that builds ownership of the process as much as the outcomes of the research, so that the research can directly inform decision making and city planning processes. While the term is now gaining popularity in research circles, the idea of equitable and effective partnerships has long been part of development discourse. What equitable partnership means in practice, however, is difficult to determine as there are manifold and contested meanings of “partnership” and “equity.” A clear definition or even principles remain hard to pinpoint. Despite there being no commonly agreed criteria of what makes a partnership equitable, the review identified common features across discussions of effective (equitable) partnerships that we argue should inform how the Hub builds, maintains and evaluates partnerships, including: Acknowledge principles of equality, mutuality, reciprocity, and respect. This incorporates recognising and ensuring a mutual understanding of differences between the partners and how these differences can influence the partnership. This includes differences based on cultural and contextual backgrounds, including varying capacities, priorities, timeframes, organisational incentive structures and other practices. Acknowledge and make power differences explicit, including that funding flows affect relationships and create power asymmetries. Funding and benefits that people get from the research need to be made explicit and equity in decision making can help address power differences. Power also influences which types of evidence and knowledge are valued and consequently how research is designed and implemented and the type of outputs that are produced for which audiences. Equitable partnerships challenge hierarchies of evidence and knowledge and are inclusive of local and Indigenous knowledges. At their core, partnerships are built on interpersonal relationships that are based on mutual trust. Transparency and accountability are important aspects of building this. Open communication between all partners throughout the partnership lifetime is key. Trust is one of the fundamentals of well-functioning partnerships and takes time to establish through regular, open communication. Engage with the context that shapes the partnership and create space for mutual learning so that the partnership can adapt to the changes in the external context. This requires bringing partners into how success if valued and evaluated and enabling learning across all to inform adaptation. This includes the global funding context within which partnerships are formed. There is a dearth of evidence of how working in equitable partnerships support development impact and a lack of specific assessments of implementation and contextual differences of equitable partnerships. This highlights a unique opportunity for Tomorrow’s Cities to contribute to the emergent research topic of evaluating equitable partnerships in large-scale research for development programmes. As we note in the review, existing definitions are mainly based on ideas and research by researchers from the Global North, which adds an opportunity for the Hub to shift this trend and build equitable partnerships through leadership of colleagues in LMIC of operation. Starting points for what to focus evaluation on are to consider how the partnership is performing on the design, systemic and relational dimensions, in terms of recognition, procedure and distribution. Going beyond the “usual suspects” and opening up opportunities for those other than existing national and institutional partnerships is also seen as a potential key factor in measuring the equity of a partnership

Who owns the sea? Investigating the trends and perceptions of enclosure in Scottish seas

For half a century, the seas have been transforming from a mare nullius, to an area of enclosed and private rights. Despite the growing body of literature addressing these transitions, there has been a lack of engagement with property rights and enclosure in Scotland’s seas. Using a conceptual lens of historical institutionalism, the research explores the drivers, consequences, and perceptions of enclosure in two case studies in Scotland; spatial enclosure via marine spatial planning, and resource access enclosure in fisheries. Defining enclosure as the process of concentrating rights and power, the research foregrounds the issues of power imbalances, distributional conflicts, and a lack of knowledge and transparency. Q-methodology is applied to detail the range of views on enclosure in the participating stakeholders. The findings of the thesis suggest that the introduction of both the MSP regime, and the market-led fisheries management system, are not efficiently allocating resources in a rational manner. Rather, institutional change has been steadily influenced by political thinking and powerful actors, so that rights and resources are being concentrated to fewer hands. The research also suggests that a diverse array of understandings of ownership are present in Scotland’s seas that are not currently foregrounded in policy. Excluding these forms of ownership will lead to further tensions between users. As such, understanding the marine environment as a series of social institutions is necessary for designing a governance regime that is both equitable and sustainable. By understanding the sources of rights, and how they are performed in concrete relations between individuals, regulators can better address potential conflicts, and avoid destructive enclosure. The research therefore recommends further engagement with stakeholders, and acknowledgement of rights through different participatory or financial channels.James Watt Scholarshi

The Current State and Future Trajectory of the Sharing Economy: A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a transformative impact on social and economic value, as well as the role of mediating technology and regulation driving participation in the sharing economy. Considering the consequences that such transformations entail, in this paper, we provide a multi-stakeholder perspective of the pandemic\u27s impact on sharing economy enablers and drivers, and the resulting short and long-term implications for customers, providers, platform companies, and policymakers. Through the amalgamation and exploration of these multiple perspectives, we then present a roadmap of the key research themes, considerations, and policy gaps, supplemented with insights contributing toward the vision for a sustainable sharing economy. The comprehensive overview provided in this paper offers multiple avenues for future research across social, economic, technological, and regulatory domains

The Upstream Sources Of Bias: Investigating Theory, Design, And Methods Shaping Adaptive Learning Systems

Adaptive systems in education need to ensure population validity to meet the needs of all students for an equitable outcome. Recent research highlights how these systems encode societal biases leading to discriminatory behaviors towards specific student subpopulations. However, the focus has mostly been on investigating bias in predictive modeling, particularly its downstream stages like model development and evaluation. My dissertation work hypothesizes that the upstream sources (i.e., theory, design, training data collection method) in the development of adaptive systems also contribute to the bias in these systems, highlighting the need for a nuanced approach to conducting fairness research. By empirically analyzing student data previously collected from various virtual learning environments, I investigate demographic disparities in three cases representative of the aspects that shape technological advancements in education: 1) non-conformance of data to a widely-accepted theoretical model of emotion, 2) differing implications of technology design on student outcomes, and 3) varying effectiveness of methodological improvements in annotated data collection. In doing so, I challenge implicit assumptions of generalizability in theory, design, and methods and provide an evidence-based commentary on future research and design practices in adaptive and artificially intelligent educational systems surrounding how we consider diversity in our investigations