Assessing the digital well-being of educational technologies supported by learning analytics

Abstract

The accelerating adoption of digital technologies creates a direct relationship between the status of individual and societal well-being on one hand, and the state of the digital technologies that underpin human life experiences on the other. This technological shift is represented in the domain of Education by Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), a field of research and practice. The potential of technological advances to enhance learning has been well explored, as well as many of the challenges to the effective use of technology in education. Less research has been undertaken, however, on the ethical considerations related to TEL use and research. When data analytics are integrated into TEL in the form of Learning Analytics (LA), the ethical concerns about the impact of educational technologies on human well-being become more relevant. This doctoral thesis aims at exploring indicators and methods that can support the assessment of the well-being impacts of LA-supported educational technologies. Value-sensitive design (VSD) methodology and elements of the IEEE P7010 Well-being Impact Assessment (WIA) were followed to achieve the objectives of this thesis. The term well-being was conceptualized in the TEL field through workshops with LA tool’s developers and a systematic literature review, resulting in around 70 well-being indictors covering twelve life domains. The findings indicated that the wellbeing impact of TEL is more scoped in four main domains: affect, community, psychology, and education. Samples of users were consulted about the well-being indicators of two cases of LAsupported educational technologies, which were learning design community platforms and a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tool. Data collection scenarios were applied to enable the assessment of the CSCL tool on certain aspects of teachers’ and learners’ well-being, particularly teacher-perceived stress and students’ basic psychological needs satisfaction. The findings shed light on how the tool’s interface support the student’s basis psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence, indicating that relatedness and completeness are more perceived by the students who participated in collaborative learning activities supported by the tool. The triggers of teacher-perceived stress when orchestration those activities were found to be either technological difficulties, actions by students or time-related issues.