AI Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Opportunity or Risk for Students with Disabilities?
[Music] foreign [Applause] opportunity or risk for students with disabilities there was a question yesterday to this topic um and we all know that AI edtech may bring many opportunities to adapt higher education to the needs of its learners but that's that automatically mean that people of disabilities have the choice use their chances so that we will Deep dive now um because AI can also entail biases against people with disabilities and exclude them from the game so we will discuss now with orian the opportunities and the risks of AI attack for students with disabilities um she's a research assistant and PhD candidate it her full name is orian Perez she has been working at the Zurich in the University of applied science for two years on two projects to make Swiss universities more accessible in February last year she started her PhD at the University of Zurich on the topic of AI ethics and disability so we are amidst of the topic we are very happy to have you here and we are totally keen on your questions there you are orian question in German and English whatever you like great okay um thank you so now I would like to talk to you about um whether I want to ask you whether AI educational Technologies can foster or hinder inclusion for students with disabilities in higher education before we move on I would like just to give you a little structure about what we're going to talk about and first I will just introduce some definition and remind you of the law and then we will move on to the to AI Biz assistive Technologies and their potential and limits before we talk about discrimination risk that we identify by screening the literature and finally at the end I will give you a small Tech home message and provide you some with some first Solutions on how to ensure inclusivity in higher education with AI okay so let's start with introduction and just to be clear and when I talk about AI I mean weak AI not a super intelligent robot that can do everything but really applications using machine learning techniques and to solve a tasks hopefully better than human and I also talk about assistive Technologies because they are different um they face different issues than general purpose Technologies so assistive Technologies are technologies that are used to increase maintain or improve the functional capabilities of person with disabilities and and as you will see if if it's about enabling students it's quite different than when you try to monitor them or evaluate them another definition I want us to be clear on is what disability is what does it mean um according to what Health Organization disability results from the interaction with between individuals with a health condition such as cerebral palsy with personal and environmental factors including negative attitudes and accessible transportation and public buildings and limited social support and what this meant is that the barriers that students with disability face are not an individual problem but a collective one and for instance if a university decides not to let a student with ADHD for instance to use a computer for an exam it doesn't mean the student cannot do it because of ADHD but because they were not given the fair chances to give back their knowledge and I want also to remind you of that it is a right there's a right to education for students with disabilities both in international law so you have the United Nations convention on the rights of person with disabilities that was adopted in 2006 and Germany signed it quite quickly in 2007 and it entered into fourths it has a 2009 it's actually earlier than in Switzerland where they adopted it or it entered into Force five years later and in that convention there's clearly a right to say that they have a fair they should have a fair access to higher education and there's also national law that also guarantees that kind of Rights in Germany it's the gazettes it was adopted in 2002 but it was since it has been since then updated and to promote the inclusion we are really moving from a one-size-fit-all approach towards more um Universal Design for Learning that's a framework that recognized that every student is different and we need to engage with them differently and there are three principles for this so first um you need to motivate students differently by for instance letting students choose how they want to learn at their own pace for instance second you need to represent information differently so for instance with audio format with video format maybe with a Project based as we heard earlier this morning and that's different way of interacting with students and finally you need to give students and the opportunity to engage differently to give their knowledge back differently so for instance you can give students the opportunity to choose between an oral or a written exam so to sum it up you need an open mindset for inclusion you need flexibility and personalization and of course you also need time to discuss adaptation and the hope is that a how AI could help us with this goal um so let's talk about AI based assistive Technologies because this is a really good way to start even though there are some limits so for instance you have writing and reading tools and for instance they can help to either identify spelling mistakes and make suggestions for child with a tool like grammarly it can facilitate a reading so for instance you have a immersive reader that is an Integrity tool in Microsoft software that enable to increase the size of the text just see the text only and not something else that would distract you it separates syllables it changes color and that's quite useful for people with ADHD or dyslexia and more recently of course Chad DPT was for instance said for students with dyslexia to facilitate summarizing content or also simplifying content but as usual um technology is not a miracle if you give make it easier to produce texts it's also possible that you know you will think oh yeah but now it's easy to write text so they can do it um but actually those students might still prefer to choose all assignments you should not overload them with writing assignments maybe oral assignment is better for them so the key question is are the key Point here is actually to ask them what is still better for them and also chat DBT is to new and experimental so it's important to be aware that it sounds promising and I'm quite hopeful myself but we still need to run some tests to see how far it can go and how good it is another example of ai-based assistive Technologies are automatic captions you can't find them on Zoom Ms themes on YouTube even in PowerPoint and it saves a lot of time to create captions compared to creating them manually and you really go from zero accessibility to some accessibility for students for instance who are deaf and um it also helped Focus it's not just people with hearing impairment but if you read and listen to someone you use these two senses and it helps you concentrate and process information and focus so that's very helpful for someone with a with ADHD and it also facilitate taking notes again technology is not a miracle um it's it's quite good but accuracy is still limited it still needs human correction so if you're a non-native speaker you can still listen to to the video and say okay this word was not correct but I could hear it if you have a hearing impairment this might not be the case that's why you still need to correct for it and um there's another issue is that usually speech to text software and have difficulties transcribing a typical speech which literally means that some people's voice will not be heard or at least transcribed so that's also there are some projects doing this I know Google is working on this but that's still an issue that we need to keep in mind so I've been talking to you about assistive Technologies and how it can help students with disabilities but honestly when I looked into the literature when you talk about AI educational Technologies though the assistive Technologies are not necessarily the technologies that we talk about we talk about maybe predicting if a students will need some help or providing intelligent tutoring system that can recommend you some resources and we find that there are more issues on this but before I continue and go into the details I want to explain to you what what is the issue with AI and disability and why we need to be careful so the first thing is disability is a characteristic that is diverse multiple and evolutive diverse because well within the category of disability you have lots of disability you have visual hearing impairments you have cognitive impairments and also it's important to know that the same one person two person with the same visual impairment will not necessarily have the same barriers and the same needs and that's very important to remember because it will affect how you can improve inclusion for them second disability is multiple because many students many people with disabilities have more than one disability and it's also evaluative evolutive because if you think about ADHD for instance it can be that one day you can focus very well on a task and they are the day you cannot which doesn't mean that the person is Faking It it simply means this person has a DHT and for AI it's quite confusing because then this characteristic is actually changing and it's too diverse it's too multiple and that's why they are likely to be outlier and on top of this usually the characteristic is underrepresented in data sets here on the slides you have fake tissues example please don't believe that this is real that there's a positive relationship between participation participation on online platform and final exam grade but let's imagine there is the grace goes from 0 to 20 that the French system 20 is the best and you want to find out you want to predict the final grade so the AI we looked at how much you participate on the online platform for instance how much you clicked on activities because I knew I said well if the person read the materials then they learn so they will get a good grade and they managed to do that with them with the blue dots in the Middle where you have a monster a pattern and you realize okay there's a positive relationship but then you have outliers on the slide they are on a red triangle and for instance you have this one student who barely went on the online platform but still scored very well AI will have difficulty managing to under to predict something for the student because it's an outlier but it could be because the platform was inaccessible for a student with visual impairment so they didn't use the platform but it still caught as well because they use an alternative way to learn and that's how we think AI could face difficulty with that kind of data um when so we looked into the literature to find out whether they talk about ethical constants and students with disability and research and and students um and so we found 57 articles that presented an AI application that assess understood broadly that assess students and inform to informal information decision or to take decisions and what we found out first is that um most most articles did not talk about ethical concerns at all and when they did they talked about privacy and privacy was understood very Loosely if they just mentioned that um the anonymize the data we counted it as privacy because it at least suggests that they know about privacy concerns and they accounted for it and very few were talked about bias and transparency even though it's actually well-known issues in AI ethics and another concern is that almost nobody talks about students with disabilities only three out of 57 articles and this might be because usually the papers Focus had a technical perspective and forgot about didactics but it's quite problematic because we know if we do not account if we do not test for student receive disabilities they are likely not to be considered and they are likely to have the issues that I mentioned before with AI and so we identified several risks in the use of AI educational Technologies for students with disabilities I want to emphasize that we actually have more risks but I summarize so that it doesn't last too long and the first thing is it's quite common but the choice of data we need to be careful about does its type of data could correlate with disability somehow or have have an impact for them and here I come back to the example of interaction log data usually it's quite exciting to be able to use them because you think well it focuses more on the behavior and not so much about who you are what your characteristic is but as I said if the platform is not accessible then interaction data interaction log data is likely to be different if you have a disability and it could be that the intelligent tutoring system does not work for you and the second thing is that sometimes AI will rely on simplistic classification that especially the case when you try to identify if a student is at risk of failing or not but in the end you just end up with knowing this is this student likely to drop out or not it's only a binary logic actually whereas you actually want to know why is this student failing you want to personalize education and AI does not provide you this information usually and the third one is monitoring students faces that can be used to check if you are cheating if students are cheating in an exam or to assess their attention and not only is this a breach of privacy if you do not ask students whether they agree with this but there are also issues of bias and that it could completely not work for students with disabilities if they have for instance unusual facial features then the facial recognition system will not recognize the face of a student for instance or it could be flagging all the time someone because this person is entitled to have a personal assistant during an exam and then we'll all the time saying well this student may be cheating and then they are more under surveillance than others and finally what I noticed is that educational Technologies is usually to add lectures rather than students even when it could be more for students they are not really involved they do not have the power they are not the one taking decisions even though some did in the literature and I think it's problematic because you need to enable students more than control them so let's wrap it up um so they are definitely advantages to using AI for inclusion it can definitely reduce its some barriers it can enable education to be more flexible and to fulfill this multi-sensory principle so that you have more than two senses when you teach and study um it can save time which is a potential to spend more time on meaningful discussion which is very important to for inclusion but at the same time we need to be cautious because apparently there's a lack of pedagogical and ethical perspective in the literature and especially if you think about it because I looked into literature but we know big companies are doing this and it's also questionable whether they really account for this even though they have teams for that but in the end they also want to make money and we notice also that the perspective of students with disability is missing whereas if we want to to to to to Foster inclusion we need to bring them to the table we need to learn what they need because they are the ones who have this this expertise and there are several issues regarding inclusivity buyers error privacy and expectation settings so what can we do now um of course I don't have the perfect solution it cannot be solved just like this but there are some um starting points that I would like to provide to you and so first I would encourage you to involve students with disability both in design and evaluation do not just wait for them at the end of the design process right and it also means so if you're a developer then it's in the design process but if you are in higher education and you want to buy new products maybe try to think first about has assistive Technologies and try to think how can we enable students and really to instead of controlling them this is also something that we talk about this morning and actually thought Ah that's good because then I'm not the only one thinking this um also I would invite you to follow Universal Design principles and basically really always consider could that be that this person does not have this ability and if so what can we do and you will see that when you do this it can actually strive um Innovation because many Technologies for instance Voice Assistant were first thought for people with disabilities who really need them and then you realize that it can actually help everyone just like for instance for captioning it helps more than students with hearing impairment um third I would like to encourage you to always acknowledge ethical constants if you are a developer or researchers if you're writing an article I would invite you to talk about what you did to um to address the ethical concept they are there and then it means for people who want to develop further then they will think okay how can I cope with this issue or maybe you it's just a reminder for everyone there are ethical concerns we need to address them it shouldn't block you two to write but it's still something that needs to be addressed and if you're a buyer then you should try to favor those that seems to be committed to this goal and finally my last message is that technology is not always the solution sometimes you actually need to be open-minded because what you notice is that sometimes you have many tools and then you will try to put it on students and say well this is the tool this is what you need but actually sometimes you need to listen to people because they know themselves better than you do and they will be able to tell you oh but I would actually prefer to have this and then by listening to this person then you can actually strive inclusion and that's why you really need a holistic vision and try to see how technology is really enabling humans rather than control them thank you on point one point you get a lot of or you got a lot of Hearts like bubbles on the web um there are no questions so far digitally if you have any questions I'm more than happy to take them so long I might start I must confess I don't have so much experiences in this field to to derive any questions from but I have a question because I'm sometimes working for consultant consultancy companies that very much addressed the topic of mental health in the diversity context for the employees so do you think that the general talk about diversity and inclusion that everybody is different bring something for the people who really feel that they have a kind of disability in whatever contexts so is there a movement talking about societies that you think that is backing up what you are fighting for or not or is it still very hard Road and I will try to stay optimistic I think um let me think I think there's still an issue of um a bit like green washing you know when you try to show I you know we're doing all this and seeing it like as a charity um I think it you need to be careful you need to want it and to really work with the people because I think this is how you actually manage to to bring accessibility forward um yeah I think that would be mine but but I I I try to imagine that often if I have the feeling that I have a disability in something there's the question of Shame Etc and then I think maybe if we have developers Etc and they they have their own challenges let's let let's say if they could put it into the bowl to say that I have a problem with ABC and then I can really work on it for the better good of everybody do you think we we need more of these people that they confess that they are slower in this or you know what I mean so is it yeah yeah I agree I think um it needs to be more visible of course for the ones who want to but I think it's good when when people recognize their own limits and I think when you know like many people strive try to hire more people who are more diverse right yeah and recently I read a book on a bios from Jessica and Royal and the thing is when you hire people it's good but you really need to change your mindset and to in companies to think I want to have this person because this person knows something I don't know and if she's the only one or they are the only one saying different then maybe you should question maybe this person is saying differently because they have a different perspective and doubt yourself why you disagree with this person I think this is how you can actually so the first step is to hire them and to get in contact with them but then also really listen to them I sometimes ask myself there's a saying that a city for children that is built for children is better for everybody and and this refer to the AI topic is I ask myself if we really consider the people with their different needs carefully wouldn't that be better for everybody you know what I mean like for the whole working atmosphere the Akram kite there's the saying uh in German I don't know the word in English so so what do don't you believe that if we take this more seriously this adds something also to the working culture not only to the people with disabilities but like to the connection to the community Spirit to the like everybody to his or her needs do you believe in that actually do actually that's connected to Universal Design principles one of the principles is to say it needs to be simple and intuitive in you so I guess this is what it goes right with uh children and I think if anyone can use it then people are not so scared about using it and then you do not assume someone can do that to be able to use it so yeah I think I have another question waiting for your question um when why kids have been small in in starting school there were a lot of parents very concerned about dyslexia with their children mine coincidentally didn't have it but it was terrible so every single test was a horror for the kids and for the parents so I imagine AI could be a very powerful tool to identify these disabilities and say okay we take it out of the game because this is not a bad learning it's just the problem of the person so couldn't we use AI very specifically for special specific hinderings do you know in testing Etc I think this could be a wonderful step towards the future yes I agree um especially because I think actually for dyslexia you know if you have dyslexia then you are put into that category but actually everybody has some competences that are better or or Worse right and I think if we if there are some competencies that are not so important anymore like being able to write correctly honestly everybody is writing or like not everybody but most work now is very digital right we write emails we write on our phones and it already accounts for this so maybe we should start stopping about worrying about this um this form and concentrate on the content because in the end what we want to know is what but what people think and what they have to say and maybe we should stop worrying about the form in the case of dyslexia any if there's no more questions so far you have a question yeah yeah there's one coming in please now we want to hear your voice oh my God so there's one question from the chat what would AI do that a human could not um and what would you want the process to be less humanized what no and what you would you want the process to be less humanized oh that's a very general one um so what could AI do and humans could not um I think an AI could um provide feedback 24 7 right um so for instance if you need some support um let I have a good example maybe so for instance there's be my eyes which is an application to help people with a visual impairment to reach a volunteer and then with your phone and your camera your smartphone then the person the volunteer can describe what the person is showing so let's say there's an obstacle in the road then they can sit and what they're trying to do is with open AI they are trying to make a virtual assistant and with open um chat GPT or gpt4 actually you can also have this feedback right asking further questions and I think what this virtual assistant can do what a human cannot do SP always ready always there and I think [Music] um I cannot really talk for them but usually um what people want is to be independent so it's true that if you can reach someone anytime from anywhere then it's actually um an added value but then the question is do you miss maybe talking to someone was it worth it because some people would say well I prefer with someone because then it's nicer and then people say oh I'm happy to have helped you have a nice day and then you really have an interaction but some people would be maybe Shire and they just don't want to talk to someone at that point or maybe it's something more private that they just don't want to talk to someone to let them know is it the right temples that I chose or is it something completely different and that's that's what I could assume can I ask you as a final question can you ask you an ethical question talking about dementia I would like to know from you talking about elderly people for example we have these cats and they are reacting so so from a medical point of view it might be good for a patient to have this interaction but it's not human how do you it goes beyond the topic we are talking here but do you how do you judge this how do you see this from an ethical because you have a lot of ethical questions and fair and and and and yeah so so how do you judge that um replacing humans by AI yeah I think we so where I would be more careful I think human contact is quite important especially actually for anybody um and to be careful that this service is not just given to people who have less money or maybe in the countryside where they are less um less medical centers so I think those are the concerns that I have but if it's complementary and if it's um because people again cannot be there all the time and I've seen there's a robot that's a seal it looks very cute and apparently there are some good results so I mean if it shows its effect then I do not see why not if again considering the the limits but if it's complementary people like it it works people are not deceived also because then you need to be clear what it means but if people like it yeah oh yeah thank you so very much thank you very much for listening oh yeah thank you um I wanted to thank for the first time I think in these two days I wanted to thank our wonderful team behind the scenes normally you do this at the end of the day so I don't know who will stay until uh five hours 30. so big thanks to everybody behind the scenes I don't name them in person to every girl and every guy who's like make it running bringing this back to life helping us at the laptops so so whatever big big Applause please also digitally with your bubbles for the great team behind [Applause] hierarchy is here and I really love this kind of work this is also like walking the talk and I really you don't know who has what on on the business card so this is uh wonderful in this context we have 13 and a half minutes pause now we restart at 14 25 with one of the big shots in the field we again dance campuses
2023-05-22 22:43
