International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract—This paper investigates educators’ perceptions of the application of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education (AIHEd) and its benefits and concerns within the Jordanian higher education. Like in other contexts, the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Jordanian higher education brought many benefits and a variety of concerns. Due to the lack of regulations and clear policies to cope with such new technologies, the increasing prevalence of these concerns has a negative impact on academic integrity. We used a sequential exploratory mixed approach to accomplish our study, which is guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which helps in analysing the adoption of AI in higher education. Our approach involves conducting interviews with university educators from three different Jordanian universities. Interviews were done to identify educators’ thoughts regarding the responsibility of universities to adopt new AI technologies, what motivates them to use AI tools and services in their daily work, whether using AI in higher education institutions is legitimate, and the concerns associated with implementing such technologies into practice. Thus, the paper tries to portray the acceptable benefits and concerns of using AI in Jordanian higher education institutions. After conducting a thematic analysis on 18 interviews with educators, we identified 10 corresponding benefit themes and 8 corresponding concern themes that resulted from the coding and theme-building process. The average rate of educators’ responses to the themes of benefits and concerns is then determined by distributing a questionnaire to 145 higher education educators to generalise the results. Although our findings offer valuable insights, further investigation in wider contexts may be necessary to ensure the representativeness and generalisability of the findings. Through the themes that the study outlined, we concluded that although AI can transform the way students learn and educators work, there are still several issues that need to be resolved by researchers and teachers who work with associated application systems. Such issues require greater emphasis on appropriately and logically handling related ethical dilemmas. These concerns also highlight the importance of developing the necessary strategies and skills for responsible AIHEd. Using a mixed approach helped us to develop a strong understanding of the current state of AIHEd in the Jordanian context.

Keywords—Artificial Intelligence (AI), higher education, educators, perceptions, developing countries, Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education (AIHEd)

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Cite: Saheer Al-Jaghoub, Lamis F. Al-Qora’n, Abdelsalam M. Al-Odat, and Ahmad F. Alheet, "Educators’ Perceptions on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Insights from the Jordanian Higher Education," International Journal of Information and Education Technology, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 716-731, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).