AI-Facilitated Lecturers in Higher Education Videos as a Tool for Sustainable Education: Legal Framework, Education Theory and Learning Practice

The study aims to establish a comprehensive framework aligning institutional governance, pedagogical theories, and teaching practice for the sustainable adoption of AI-facilitated digital representatives of human instructors in higher education videos within universities. The study employs a systemic qualitative approach and grounded theory principles to analyze administrative/legal documents and academic publications. The methodology includes source searching and screening, automated text analysis using the Lexalytics tool, clustering and thematic interpretation of the findings, and a subsequent discussion of the emerging perspectives. Following the analysis of international/supranational/national regulations, the findings reveal a significant regulatory gap for humans’ digital representatives in educational videos and suggest a governance baseline for tailored institutional guidelines that address data protection, copyright, and ethical compliance. Theoretically, the study synthesizes evidence-informed educational theories and concepts to form a robust theoretical foundation for using humans’ digital representatives in higher education instructional videos and identifies constructivism, student-centered personalized learning, multimodal multimedia-based learning principles, smart and flipped classrooms, and post-digital relations pedagogy as crucial foundational concepts. The findings suggest a thematic taxonomy that outlines diverse digital representative types, their varying efficiency based on knowledge and course type, and university community attitudes highlighting benefits and challenges. The overall contribution of this research lies in an integrated interdisciplinary framework—including the legal context, pedagogical theory, and promising practices—that guides the responsible use of digital human representatives in higher education videos. © 2025 by the authors.