A Study on the Ethical Challenges of Digitalization in Vocational Education

Data security, fairness, and accountability of automated decision-making are some of the key ethical issues in digital technologies, still posing a serious risk. In this paper, scenario simulation and expert assessment are used to create three common digital education scenarios such as a learning management system gathering data, a system of automatic scoring based on AI, and a system of career planning based on recommendations. The alternatives applied in both situations are the use of various combinations of strategies such as data encryption and anonymization, access auditing, the creation of interpretability mechanisms in the algorithm, regular reviewing the algorithm, and offering ethical training to teachers. The experiment called upon education administrators, teachers and technical experts to consider each of the strategies in three dimensions, namely, data security, algorithmic fairness, and decision-making accountability. Effectiveness of the strategies was then compared using average scores. The findings indicate that the overall combination of the strategies is quite efficient in reducing ethical risks. Taking the example of learning management system, a combination of data encryption and data anonymization and access auditing and teacher training and algorithm review will result in an average score of 4.67; however, it will be approximately 0.4-0.5 points higher than a single strategy.