Recommender Systems for Students in Flexible Education: An Exploration of Benefits and Risks

Since flexibilisation of education is stimulated by governments’ strategic agendas, many higher education institutions are making their programmes more flexible by offering students more opportunities to choose elective courses within the curriculum. Digital tooling has the potential to support students in their decision-making processes imposed upon them by the flexibilisation of education. Recommender systems are increasingly suggested as a promising possibility to support students’ choice processes. In this position paper, we explore the envisioned benefits and the looming risks of deploying recommender systems towards this end. Through a reflection on these benefits and risks, we list some important dilemmas that this technology evokes for stakeholders in educational practice, most importantly students. Given this non-trivial list of dilemmas, we believe the time is not ripe just yet to deploy recommender systems to students in real-life contexts. We posit that the design and implementation of these systems should first be rigorously studied in transparent, small-scale, research-based pilots to explore these dilemmas and gain insights into the impact that such technology has on students.