Conference Agenda

With the continuous upsurge of digitization, automation and artificial intelligence (AI), educational institutions around the world are confronted with the requirement to responsibly navigate the embedment of technologies in teaching and learning (Perotta 2024). The same is true for policy actors and administrators who steer the implementation and regulation of technology usage within broader contexts of governance. Particularly over the past years, growing evidence of the many risks and (unintended) effects of technology usage - including the perpetuation or even increase of social inequality, growing power imbalances or lock-in effects -, have raised awareness for the urgent need to support educators and institutions more strongly in socially responsible and risk-aware digitization strategies, including decisions on local technology implementation (Macgilchrist et al. 2024). A clear indicator hereof is a growing number of policy initiatives and research-practice partnerships that target more holistic digitalization strategies, guidelines for educators, or digital education competence frameworks such as the most recent update of the European DigCompEdu (www.digcomphub.eu). Such initiatives have also started to recognize the close interrelation between educational digitalization and today´s manifestations of poly-crisis, including growing threats to democracy, or the pressing questions of the planetary future.

While it seems important to acknowledge such developments as important steps towards the future, critical scholarship has problematized that many initiatives and frameworks follow a rather solutionist approach to social and ethical dilemmas (e.g., seemingly resolving ethical challenges by ‘ticking the boxes’ of GDPR). Also, many initiatives tend to establish a “moralistic governance regime” (Giesler & Veresiu 2014) that shifts the responsibility of critical and ethical technology usage to the individual, that is, primarily to educators. It is the same educators, however, who are particularly vulnerable to the conditions of algorithmic governance, who face opaqueness of technological infrastructures as well as a dramatic lack of time and resources.

The symposium addresses this dilemma, discussing attempts of (critical) education scholarship to provide additional support for educators, educational institutions, administrators and policy to more strongly acknowledge the complex nature of social responsibility around digital education, but also to enhance capacity to act critically, responsibly, and politically (Raffaghelli 2022). More particularly, the symposium focuses on the (co-)creation and dissemination of Open Education Resources (OERs), that is, artefacts which try to mediate knowledge and strategies for action to users. In fact, OERs have already for a long time been a popular approach to disseminate knowledge between research and practice and have equally become a central approach in the field of (critical) data and algorithmic literacy (Sander 2024). At the same time, the hopes put in OERs´ potential particularly in terms of usability and impact also stand in contrast to the many challenges of creating OERs that successfully navigate complexity and simplicity, critique and optimism, as well as science and practice. There is, hence, also a growing interest in Open Education Practices (OEP), including the challenges associated with achieving ‘openness’ in the process of creating, distributing, and using OER when, for instance, many of the available production tools and distribution platforms are proprietary (Koseoglu & Bozkurt 2018; Aksoy & Kursum 2024).

Against this background, the presentations of this symposium provide insights into different projects in different countries that include the (co-) creation of OERs to foster the critical navigation of digital education. The presentations hereby cover broader perspectives on policy and governance developments as well as specific OER approaches situated within these developments. The symposium will be rounded up by a discussant input.

To date, digitization policies have targeted schools and teachers, with less focus on school providers (school maintaining bodies responsible for technical infrastructure, equipment procurement, and material costs), as visible also in the German case. However, various modernization initiatives, including those aiming to increase a digital up-take in schools, have given local school providers new opportunities to shape the internal design of the German school system (Hermstein 2021). Against this background, the TOBIS project aims to strengthen transprofessional collaboration with regards to a socially and pedagogically responsible digitization strategy among school authorities, education administrators, academia, and practitioners. TOBIS utilizes Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) as a methodological framework, conceptualizing RPPs as mutually beneficial collaborations that bridge research and practice, fostering co-creation and knowledge exchange (Farrell et al. 2021). From a Science-and-Technology-Studies (STS) informed perspective (e.g. Sismondo 2010, Zakharova 2022) – conceptualizing infrastructure as relational practice (Star & Ruhleder 1996) and examining how technical decisions encode pedagogical assumptions (Akrich 1992) – TOBIS draws on data gathered from the RPP sessions to analyze how responsibility for Open Educational Resources (OER), tied to digitization, is distributed between school providers and schools. Of core interest are the unfolding Open Educational Practices (OEP) that are entangled with doing OER, referring to the nexus of practices intertwined with “the creation, use and management of OER” (Ehlers & Conole 2011). The presentation focuses on the entanglement of allocation and diffusion and highlights three key-aspects. 1) What we reconstruct as “limited foresight” refers to the impression that schools lack time and expertise to gauge how certain proprietary ecosystems may constrain future OEP. 2) "Fragmented knowledge" refers to schools negotiating individually with providers, preventing shared learning of technology implementation experiences. 3) “Deferred decisions” refers to e.g. postponed purchasing decisions that lead to “equipment without concept” or “concept without equipment,” thereby hindering the introduction of OER and OEP. Our findings suggest implications for research and OEPs of school providers. From a STS perspective, the empirical insights remind us that delegating decision-making power also delegates moral and governance responsibility (Bowker & Star, 2000). To assess platform compatibility with open practices, schools must be provided with information and negotiation power. Conversely, school providers cannot remain value-neutral infrastructure providers. Their actions pre-structure pedagogical spaces for OER (Williamson, 2021). Opportunities to unfold OEP therefore require binding and co-created guidelines that couple device purchase with open-content strategies, as well as knowledge circulation across schools.

Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology / building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 205–224). MIT Press. Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press Conole, G. C., & Ehlers, U.-D. (2010). Open Educational Practices: Unleashing the power of OER. 10. https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/OEP_Unleashing-the-power-of-OER.pdf Hermstein, B. (2021). Wer spielt warum mit? Schnittstellen in der Schulsystementwicklung und Prozesse ihrer Rationalisierung.DDS - Die Deutsche Schule, 113 (1), 14-29. Farrell, C.C., Penuel, W.R., Coburn, C., Daniel, J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research-practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111 Williamson, B. (2021). Making markets through digital platforms: Pearson, edu-business, and the (e)valuation of higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 50–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1737556 Zakharova, I. (2022). Understanding data studies-A methodological and conceptual inquiry into research on datafication. https://doi.org/10.26092/ELIB/1675

Over the past decade, rapid integration of education technologies (EdTech) into the everyday practices of Dutch primary schools (Kerssens & Van Dijck 2021) has been actively facilitated by persuasive technosolutionist narratives through which the EdTech industry frames its products as inevitable and pedagogically beneficial (Teras et al. 2020). However, critical EdTech scholarship demonstrates that these technologies have profound implications for children’s digital rights (Livingstone et al. 2024), pedagogical relationships, and core professional practices (Perrotta et al. 2020). Despite these impacts, schools receive little structured support to critically reflect on the pedagogical consequences of EdTech adoption and use, while existing forms of assessment are predominantly designed and provided by the EdTech industry itself (Kucirkova, 2024). This situation significantly limits schools’ capacity to govern educational technologies, making democratic EdTech assessment essential for evaluating pedagogical impacts beyond the industry’s marketing claims. This paper introduces the Pedagogical Impact Inquiry (PIO, Dutch abbreviation): a dialogical Open Educational Resource (OER) co-created by Kennisnet – Public ICT organization for primary and secondary education in the Netherlands – and Utrecht University. The PIO is designed as a hands-on tool to foster rich team discussions within schools on the pedagogical implications of EdTech already in use. Grounded in the Techno-Ethical Framework for Teachers (Adams and Groten, 2024), the PIO structures conversations around three lenses: (1) children’s rights, (2) power and control, and (3) pedagogical and formative impact. We present findings from a recent qualitative field study of a pilot version of the PIO conducted in four Dutch primary schools – in collaboration with IPABO University of Applied Sciences – through which the tool was iteratively tested and refined based on insights from moderated school team sessions. Importantly, the study shows that the PIO enabled school teams to move beyond instrumental discussions of technology towards deeper, value-laden and pedagogical reflection, often resulting in concrete adaptations to educational practice. We identify three design elements that contributed to the depth of these conversations: (1) starting from teachers’ educational values and concern for students rather than from the technology itself; (2) explicitly attending to affective experiences of teachers and pupils; and (3) incorporating physical elements to stimulate embodied positioning and collective sense-making. The paper concludes with critical reflections on key challenges for OER-based approaches to democratic EdTech assessment, including the reliance on skilled moderation, the sustainability of reflective practices within schools, and the difficulties of instrumentalizing dialogical tools as standardized EdTech assessment instruments.

Adams, C., & Groten, S. (2024). A TechnoEthical framework for teachers. Learning, Media and Technology, 49(4), 701-718. Kerssens, Niels, and José van Dijck. 2021. "The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands." Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 250-63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1876725. Kucirkova, Natalia. 2024. "Why we need global minimum quality standards in EdTech." https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/we-need-a-standardized-way-to-measure-the-impact-of-edtech-innovations/ Perrotta, Carlo, Kalervo N. Gulson, Ben Williamson, and Kevin Witzenberger. 2020. "Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom." Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 97-113. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2020.1855597. Teräs, Marko, Juha Suoranta, Hanna Teräs, and Mark Curcher. 2020. "Post-Covid-19 education and education technology ‘solutionism’: A seller’s market." Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 863-78.

Situated within the increasingly pressing challenges of ethical technology and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in Higher Education, the ETH-TECH project (“Anchoring Ethical Technology (AI and Data) Usage in the Education Practice”, www.eth-tech.eu) marks a cross-country effort to bridge critical scholarship and education practice through the (co-)creation of Open Education Resources (OERs). As a collaboration between University of Padua (Italy), University of Barcelona (Spain), Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg (Germany), the ETH-TECH project takes the European Union´s “Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence and data in teaching and learning for educators” (2022) as springboard to investigate potentials and limits of the guidelines in supporting the practical navigation of ethical tech and AI usage in Higher Education contexts. Based on awareness raising sessions with both students and educators in all four countries conducted in 2025, the project found a substantial gap between the framework requirements and its proclaimed ‘solutions’ on the one hand, and its limited acknowledgement of complex dilemmas and limited educators´ or students´ capability to address those dilemmas accordingly. As a conceptual response to this gap, the project approaches the ethical navigation of tech and AI usage as critical inquiry and as practices of care, that is, it moves beyond “rule-based ethics, and towards an approach that is more relational, situated, and decentralized” (Wardak & Zeivots 2025: 899). In such an approach, different stakeholders – mainly students and educators - come together to collectively navigate decision-making, including the acknowledgement of conflict and dissensus, balanced through radical empathy (Prinsloo & Slade 2016; Hamington 2019). To support this collective navigation, the project has, over the past year, co-created different Open Education Resources (OER) together with university students, which each specifically target one ethical principle from the EU guidelines (Transparency; Human Agency and Oversight; as well as Diversity, Non-Discrimination and Fairness), and which each use a particular method from the field of critical co-design (Brandau & Hartong, 2025). Through the multi-stage process of OER co-creation, the project explored how OERs can serve as facilitators for supporting collective ethical sense-making processes around tech and AI, but it also unpacked the various challenges of installing an OER creation process that itself follows the principles it seeks to promote.

Brandau, N., & Hartong, S. (2025). Visualising the school: a critical study on co-designing a Moodle-based learning management system. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 46(3), 307-323. European Union (2022): Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence and data in teaching and learning for educators. https://education.ec.europa.eu/news/ethical-guidelines-on-the-use-of-artificial-intelligence-and-data-in-teaching-and-learning-for-educators. Hamington, M. (2019). Integrating care ethics and design thinking. Journal of Business Ethics, 155(1), 91-103. Prinsloo, P., & Slade, S. (2016). ‘Big data, higher education and learning analytics: Beyond justice, towards an ethics of care’. Big data and learning analytics in higher education: Current theory and practice, pp. 109–24. Springer International Publishing: Cham. Wardak, D., & Zeivots, S. (2025). ‘Sensing Ethics in Postdigital Future Classrooms’, Postdigital Science and Education, 7: 899–915.