A Survey of the General Public’s Views on the Ethics of using AI in Education

Recent scandals arising from the use of algorithms for user profiling to further political and marketing gain have popularized the debate over the ethical and legal implications of using such ‘artificial intelligence’ in social media. The need for a legal framework to protect the general public’s data is not new, yet it is not clear whether recent changes in data protection law in Europe, with the introduction of the GDPR, have highlighted the importance of privacy and led to a healthy concern from the general public over online user tracking and use of data. Like search engines, social media and online shopping platforms, intelligent tutoring systems aim to personalize learning and thus also rely on algorithms that automatically profile individual learner traits. A number of studies have been published on user perceptions of trust in robots and computer agents. Unsurprisingly, studies of AI in education have focused on efficacy, so the extent of learner awareness, and acceptance, of tracking and profiling algorithms remains unexplored. This paper discusses the ethical and legal considerations for, and presents a case study examining the general public’s views of, AI in education. A survey was recently taken of attendees at a national science festival event highlighting state-of-the-art AI technologies in education. Whilst most participants (77%) were worried about the use of their data, in learning systems fewer than 8% of adults were ‘not happy’ being tracked, as opposed to nearly two-thirds (63%) of children surveyed

A User Experience Questionnaire for VR Locomotion: Formulation and Preliminary Evaluation

When evaluating virtual reality (VR) locomotion techniques, the user experience metrics that are used are usually either focused on specific experiential dimensions or based on non-standardised, subjective reporting. The field would benefit from a standard questionnaire for evaluating the general user experience of VR locomotion techniques. This paper presents a synthesised user experience questionnaire for VR locomotion, which is called the VR Locomotion Experience Questionnaire (VRLEQ). It comprises the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) and the System Usability Scale (SUS) survey. The results of the VRLEQ’s application in a comparative, empirical study (n=26) of three prevalent VR locomotion techniques are described. The questionnaire’s content validity is assessed at a preliminary level based on the correspondence between the questionnaire items and the qualitative results from the study’s semi-structured interviews. VRLEQ’s experiential dimensions’ scoring corresponded well with the semi-structured interview remarks and effectively captured the experiential qualities of each VR locomotion technique. The VRLEQ results facilitated and quantified comparisons between the techniques and enabled an understanding of how the techniques performed in relation to each other.acceptedVersio

Genetics with Jean: the design, development and evaluation of an affective tutoring system

© 2016 Association for Educational Communications and Technology. This paper details the design, development and evaluation of an affective tutoring system (ATS)—an e-learning system that detects and responds to the emotional states of the learner. Research into the development of ATS is an active and relatively new field, with many studies demonstrating promising results. However, there is often no practical way to apply these findings in real-world settings. The ATS described in this paper utilizes a generic affective application model to infer and appropriately respond to the learner’s affective state. This approach brings several advantages, notably the potential direct support for re-use and retrospective addition of affect sensing functionality into existing e-learning software. Skin conductivity and heart rate variability measurements were used to infer affective activation and valence. The evaluation involved an experiment in which the effectiveness of the fully functional ATS was compared with that of a non-affective version, and was conducted with 40 adult participants. The evaluation of the effectiveness of this tutoring system showed that measurable improvements in perceived learning may be obtained with a modest level of software development