When Learning Analytics Violate Student Privacy
The rise of analytics in higher education raises questions about the responsible use of student data. Here are some of the issues and how institutions are dealing with them.
With education technologies increasingly using analytics to measure and assess student learning, there is a lot of data flying around on higher education campuses. How are institutions establishing principles and polices around the responsible use of that data? So far, few have published clear definitions of learning data or guidelines for how students' data can be used or shared.
One exception is the University of California system, which has created a team to develop UC learning data privacy principles and recommended best practices for its campuses. The issues being addressed involve both student consent as well as university contractual relationships with third-party vendors.
"Higher education institutions are beginning to realize that students' learning data is everywhere — it is in vendors' platforms, and we don't necessarily own it," said Mary-Ellen Kreher, director of course design and development for the Innovative Learning Technology Initiative at the UC Office of the President. "At UC, we began to recognize a few years ago that this was becoming a problem."
Kreher is one of a small group of executives from across the UC system who has worked to elucidate a set of principles. She said some campuses, such as UC-Berkeley, have directly sought students' input into how their data should be used.
"We started to recognize that vendors were starting to upsell their own products and services to students because they know who the students are and how to get in touch with them.” — Mary-Ellen Kreher, University of California
"Students have a right to know how their data is being used and who uses it," she asserted. There is general acceptance that faculty will use learning data in their teaching and that the campus holds that data. But when universities start doing interventions as part of student success initiatives, students begin to question what types of data about them are being combined.
"We also found was that some vendors were using student data to commercialize or sell them products," Kreher said. "That really struck a sour note across UC, when we started to recognize that vendors were starting to upsell their own products and services to students because they know who the students are and how to get in touch with them."
One complicating factor in addressing those concerns is that faculty members sometimes use apps or low-cost software in classes, and those vendors employ click-through agreements — not contracts negotiated at the university level.
Questions of Consent
Chris Gilliard, an English professor at Macomb Community College in Michigan, studies privacy, institutional technology policy and a concept called "digital redlining," which he defines as the re-invention of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making. In a Future Trends Forum discussion hosted by futurist Bryan Alexander, Gilliard expressed skepticism about learning analytics in general and concern about the consent aspect.
"I think the most important thing we can think about when we talk about these issues is consent. So much of student analytics never asks the students what they want," he said. "The web as we know it is a faulty model. By the nature of you being on this website or using this service, I take the right to follow you everywhere and extract anything I want from you. There are a lot of things wrong with that. I am very critical of importing that model and using it on students. At least say to people, 'Here is what we want to do, and here is how we think it would help you.' If we just did that, which we don't in most cases, we could have different discussions."