CADR – Conversational Agent for Digital Responsibility
Development of a project exploring the use of a conversational agent to promote skills in the area of digital responsibility.
Duration: January 2023 – December 2023
Status: Completed
Educational Level: Tertiary Level
Topic: Digital Ethics, Digital Skills & Literacy, Digital Tools
Keywords: Digital Responsibility
Initial Situation
The ongoing process of digitalisation presents numerous ethical challenges that affect both individuals and organisations. These challenges are particularly evident in the field of education: teachers are faced with the task of using new technologies responsibly in the classroom. Issues such as creating learner profiles or predicting academic performance based on platform data raise ethical dilemmas. Without conscious engagement with such questions, undesirable consequences for education may arise. The term “Digital Responsibility” (DR) encompasses the norms, values, and principles that guide ethical engagement with digital technologies. Teachers therefore require targeted training to be able to apply digital responsibility effectively in their teaching practice.
Objectives
The project aimed to establish an international consortium to develop a research agenda on digital responsibility in education. Its core objectives included integrating existing ethical frameworks into an educational framework and developing a conversational agent for training teachers in digital responsibility.
Method
The project brought together international partners to jointly apply for an Erasmus+ grant. It aimed to systematically collect and integrate existing digital ethics frameworks and to develop a prototype chatbot (CADR). This chatbot was designed to support teachers interactively in ethical decision-making, assess their knowledge, and foster collaborative exchange. User-friendliness and transparency were key design principles.
Results
The project team successfully secured third-party funding of €1.5 million through an Erasmus+ “Alliance for Innovation” project for the follow-up initiative “L2BGreen.” This marked the establishment of an international network and laid the foundation for further development of the chatbot to promote digital responsibility.
Implemented Translation
The project established a sustainable basis for applied research. In the future, CADR is intended to offer teachers concrete support in addressing ethical challenges in everyday school life, thereby translating research findings directly into educational practice.
