TJTS4904 Responsible Digital Transformation and Technology (5 op)

Digital Transformation and Technology contribute to and can offer solutions to global warming, water pollution, and biodiversity loss. European Citizens' online activities (e.g., social media use, browsing, streaming music or videos, etc.) alone exceed the world’s yearly carbon footprint per capita. This puts pressure on society, organizations, and individuals. Indeed, practitioners and scholars start to – and must – question traditional measures for economic success and also to consider questions concerning organizations’ environmental and social success, when designing or using digital technologies to transform organizational structures and value creation. Thus, this course addresses the question of how and when is digital transformation and technology responsible.

The course “Responsible Digital Transformation and Technology” presents a global classroom between Leuphana University Lueneburg and University of Jyväskylä. In this global classroom, you will join an international group of students to learn and study responsibility as a concept and how researchers approach Responsible Digital Transformation and Technology from different perspectives. These are, e.g., ethics, universal values (such as human rights), legal compliance, and context-specific values defined by stakeholders. Through guest lectures and case discussions (Option 1) or guest lectures and your own research project (Option 2):

• You will study how the digital transformation process and its outcomes can be responsible.

• You will critically examine the responsibility of specific digital technologies (e.g., AI solutions, social media).

• You will investigate the role of data and its implications for (responsible) decision making.

After this seminar, students shall:

• know the basic concepts of responsibility in digital transformation and technology

• be able to consider responsibility from different perspectives (e.g. ethical, universal values, legal compliance, values defined with stakeholders (context-specific values))

• be able to evaluate the responsibility of digital transformation or technology using a given framework

• understand how data used by digital technologies can affect the responsibility of decisions

Besides these seminar learning goals, the two exercise options have the following learning goals:

• Students taking Option 1 shall:

- know challenges and possible solutions for R2DT in practice.
- learn to solve and discuss practical R2DT problems in case discussion sessions from multiple perspectives
- Learn to apply R2DT frameworks for practical problems

• Students taking Option 2 shall:

- know existing work within their chosen research topic.
- be able to plan and execute a research study.
- be able to collect data using data collection techniques such as interviews or archival records.
- be able to analyze data using the grounded theory method.
- be able to report their research project orally and in writing.

During the course, students will listen to lectures, read and discuss various perspectives in the area of Responsible Digital transformation and Technology (R2DT) such as responsibility in/of digital transformation, the responsibility of digital technologies (e.g. AI, IoT, social media, etc.), the role of data in digital technologies and transformation, ethics of digital technologies, governance of AI. The course consists of lectures and exercise sessions with two alternative options for exercises.

Option 1 (in Finnish): Case discussions, assessment: case report and activity in class.

Students will read case texts or play a serious game and write a short report answering given questions before the case discussion. During each case discussion, students’ participation activity will be evaluated.

Option 2 (in English): Research garage, assessment: presentation and written report.

In teams (2-3 students), students will conduct a small study on R2DT (e.g., Digital–sustainable co-transformation, responsible AI, corporate digital responsibility, etc.). They will collect and analyze data as well as present their findings during a presentation and in a written report. The presentation takes place during the last seminar sessions. The written report shall follow the structure of published articles.

The lectures and research garage are a global classroom between the Leuphana University Lüneburg (GER) and the University of Jyväskylä (FI).

Assessment criteria:

Option 1: The evaluation is based on the submitted case reports and discussion activity.

Option 2: The evaluation comprises an oral presentation and a written report on a research project. Research projects will be conducted in groups and thus are subject to a group grade.

The course will rely on articles published in scientific journals or conferences. Moreover, the guest lectures and the related material (e.g., slides, company reports, company websites) will be relevant for learning. The course material will be available on Moodle.