Paper presentation at the CAIS Conference 'Creating Spaces for Digital Futures' in Bochum

In October 2025, I attended the interdisciplinary conference Creating Spaces for Digital Futures, organized by the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) at Ruhr University Bochum on October 9–10.

I presented a paper titled “Contrasting Students' and Lecturers' Perceptions of the Likelihood and Severity of Damages from Academic Performance Prediction in Higher Education”.

Universities increasingly adopt machine learning–based academic performance prediction (APP) to improve student success and retention. However, these technologies raise ethical and practical concerns around privacy, algorithmic bias, and threats to student autonomy. While prior research has documented student worries about surveillance and unfair treatment, few studies have compared how students and lecturers perceive the associated risks. In this study, we investigated 38 potential harms identified in earlier qualitative interviews with students and conducted a large-scale comparative survey to capture both student and lecturer assessments. Using latent class analysis, we identified shared patterns of harm perception within and across both groups, highlighting points of convergence and divergence in stakeholder views. Our findings inform university strategies for designing transparent, equitable, and ethically grounded predictive systems and point toward collaborative co-design approaches that engage students and faculty from development to deployment.

More information about the conference and the full program can be found on the CAIS conference website.