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Irina Rets is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), the Open University, UK, with over a decade of experience in higher education as a lecturer, assistant professor, and researcher.
With expertise in inclusive artificial intelligence (AI) and linguistics, Irina’s current research explores how technology can be leveraged to improve social justice in the learning contexts and more generally in society. She currently works on a large-scale Erasmus+ project – “Empowering Everyone’s Engagement in Energy (Every1)” – investigating how to enable effective participation of all European stakeholders in the digital energy market.
Before her current role, Irina was a Lecturer in Online Teaching in IET, responsible for designing and chairing microcredentials and online courses on educational technology (e.g., a postgraduate-level course: Teacher Development: Addressing the Climate Emergency, a teaser to which can be found here). Between 2021 and 2025 Irina also worked with the BIAS project team at the Department of Management Science (LUMS), Lancaster University, initially as a research associate and later as a visiting researcher. Her research focused on AI fairness and employment, the management of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in organisations, and the role of digital technologies in fostering EDI.
Irina is a Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA). She has extensive experience of designing, teaching and carrying out the assessment on undergraduate and graduate courses in applied linguistics and technology-enhanced learning. She has worked in international English Medium Instruction (EMI) settings (Sakarya University, Turkey) and in the UK (IET, The Open University, and Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester).
Irina's research has been published in prestigious outlets, including among others the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Interactive Learning Environments, International Journal of Ed Tech in HE, Computer Assisted Language Learning, ReCALL, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Routledge, etc.
Irina is also active in postgraduate research supervision. She currently co-supervises two postgraduate researchers:
Truong Do, Title: "Enhancing Engagement and Comprehension in ESL Online Teaching: A Gaze Analysis Approach to Visual Aid Integration";
Freddie Gay, Title: "An investigation into the effects of instructing EAP students to use generative AI as a vocabulary learning tool".
Konnikov, Alla; Rets, Irina; Hughes, Karen D.; Alshehabi Al-Ani, Jabir; Denier, Nicole; Ding, Lei; Hu, Shenggang; Hu, Yang; Jiang, Bei; Kong, Linglong; Tarafdar, Monideepa and Yu, Dengdeng (). Responsible AI for labour market equality (BIAS). In: Hantrais, Linda eds. How to Manage International Multidisciplinary Research Projects Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 75-87.
Papathoma, Tina; Ferguson, Rebecca; Iniesto, Francisco; Rets, Irina; Vogiatzis, Dimitrios and Murphy, Victoria. (). Guidance on how Learning at Scale can be made more accessible. In: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale, Aug 12-14, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA.
