Objective: In today’s digital era, automated decision-making systems significantly affect educational planning in higher education establishments. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, big data analytics and algorithmic governance systems, universities’ traditional administrative and academic processes (such as resource allocation, course offerings decisions, admission policies, syllabus design, etc.) would inevitably be transformed so as to secure better efficiency and consistency. While the technology-enhanced systems are at the institutional level, educators’ planning is human-centered. More specifically, the question concerns how well-qualified professionals in search of a balance between institutional efficiency and educational quality experience, understand and are affected by automated systems as part of their everyday work.
Materials and Methods: This study aims to address these questions and fill a gap through an applied, descriptive-phenomenological inquiry of the educational planners' experiences and meanings in their work within public and private Iranian universities. Instead of focusing on evaluating systems or undertaking a user satisfaction study, this research intends to investigate how professionals create meaning about their interactions when they work with automated systems and how these digital systems impact their self-concept, agency in work, and professional identities in the context of an evolving digital academy. Interview questions were purposely constructed around the four existential dimensions outlined by van Manen (1990), space, body, time, and relationship. By situating the study within the four dimensions of existence, the researcher moves beyond instrumental evaluations of technology and can capture experiencing that is embodied and temporally, spatially, and relationally situated. Thematic analysis involved the use of Van Manen's interpretive, reflective writing method, his awareness of language, and context-specific interpretations to elicit the essence of the structure of the experience as lifeworld, which Van Manen refers to as the participants.
Result and discussion: The findings provide an example of an extremely dichotomous and at times contradictory experience. In a spatial sense, automated systems are both enabling and displacing. They open up digitally to a borderless, information-rich space that provides opportunities for instant access to information, modeling of future scenarios, and strategic foresight. Several participants expressed feelings of being lost, helpless, and even professional isolation when the systems made the workflows inflexible, and when systems malfunctioned, or when designers created inflexibility when the digital systems took over. With regard to the bodily dimension, experiences with automated systems create many mixed effects. When systems are functioning well, and the tempo matches the cognitive rhythms of the user, planners report heightened focus, increased mental clarity, and even a degree of physical ease while planning. Conversely, prolonged screen time, repetitively entering data (often independently from the planner), and being constantly directed (or pressured) to respond to system alerts regularly lead to physical fatigue, eye strain, tension in muscles, changes in posture, and a decrease in presence in one’s body. “My body feels like it’s just a tool for typing. My judgment sits to the side, I am typing just with my hands,” described one participant, emphasizing another layer of disconnection of mind and body within algorithmically mediated labor. Concerning the temporal dimension, although automating calendar management for a team allows for greater scheduling efficiency and decreases administrative scheduling delays, it also delivers the unique consequence of “inhuman tempo” that disrupts planners' natural workflow rhythms. The expectation of near-immediate responses combined with scheduling requests, all while splitting up tasks into micro-actions, creates an experience of a disconnected, accelerated sense of time that was characterized by many participants as stressful and dehumanizing. As one planner described, "The system does not know that good planning needs silence, not speed.” There is inherent tension in the expectations of the system through speed and algorithmic conformity to new forms of planning and the existence of planning as reflective practice; as such, automation is a layer that compromises the planner’s own definition of planning.
In conclusion, the role of automated systems in the relational dimension/discourse context promotes communication across departments and increases transparency of data, which builds one's professional identity in collaborative digital environments, but it also shifts collaborative decision-making to a machine-based practicum of data transference that generates skepticism and simultaneously erodes professional epistemology. In fact, some participants expressed concern over the sidelining of their professional judgment related to the output of an algorithm, which, either alone or collaboratively, undermined their own credibility in their institutional context. Overall, while automated decisions provide efficiencies of exchange and efficiencies of utilization, integrating these systems into planning future educational capacity should be examined and considered with intentional use that respects a human-centered ethic. The essence of these experiences heightened the simultaneous (dis)empowering and illuminated the need for applied participatory design practices that prioritize professional identity, embodied knowledge, and relational accountability in a contemporary digital shift to governing in higher education today. Technology needs to enhance human wisdom, not circumvent it in education planning.