Abstract
With the rise of technological reform and AI-empowered educational transformation, novel means of personalized learning has been developing for customized needs of learners. Nevertheless, stakeholders in the educational sphere do worry about ethics, considering it as something uncertain and risky, at least to some degree, for humans’ learning, development of critical thinking, creativity and emotional intelligence. This paper presents a study of ethical challenges and strategies in AI-enabled personalized learning context by firstly adopting a bibliometric approach to finding out gaps in previous literature, then following a qualitative interview methodology to ask for the real-world ethics violation problems from the learners and the teachers and lastly conducting a focus group interview to figure out strategies for the ethical challenges from the real world as stated by the students and teachers. A whole story of ethical challenges regarding AI-enabled personalized learning has been synthesized by the researchers based on interviews and proves to encompass the macro-level and micro-level ethical challenges, with the former further wound up by researchers from a PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal) perspective and the latter broken down from six smaller perspectives. What’s more, after focus group interview with experts and administrators in concern, practicable strategies for the ethical challenges and risks in the context of AI-enabled personalized learning are proposed.