Criteria of quality in fiction-based research to promote debate about the use of AI and robots in Higher Education

AI and robots have the potential to transform Higher Education (HE) but pose many ethical and implementation challenges. To ensure the widest debate about our choices for the future of HE with these technologies, engaging ways to present the issues are needed and this article is part of an exploration of the potential of fictional narratives to do so. Specifically, the purpose of this article is to enrich understanding of quality in such fiction-based research, through analysing responses to a collection of fictions from a group of expert readers. A starting point was synthesising previous attempts to articulate notions of quality. The discussions with the readers suggest that the key qualities were substantive contribution, credibility, resonance, ambiguity and aesthetics; rich rigour and sincerity need also to be considered. Fiction has a place in educational research because it enables one to imagine vividly different possibilities, presents issues in an open-ended way, and is engaging.