April 3rd Blog

Today I would like to discuss the potential legal and ethical related problems to Learning Analytic, but first, a reminder of what learning analytics, which is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from various sources to gain insights into student learning and educational practices. It involves using technology to track student progress, identify patterns, and make informed decisions. (Source - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ohI418m9iM542jOSYn4VyNvMFHZ_naUW-D3WSUuEd70/edit#slide=id.g6320de4b7d_0_126)

With a definition like that, what legal or ethical problems could arise? Tracking a student's progress seems to be a win-win for students and teachers! Well, whilst I don't think the students will have a problem, parents might, they may see this data and not like what it implies, as data is not very useful if you don't have anything to compare it to, and they might not like the prospect of their child being compared to others and that having influence over their children's school lives, potentially considering it a breach of privacy.

Another problem they could have is based on access to sensitive visualized information, one student could potentially see something they could use to bully another student just by being at the right place at the wrong time or vice versa. Say a teacher leaves for lunch, has their gradebook open to figure out how they're doing math groups for today to efficiently help out those who are struggling, and a student walks in because they forgot something, checks the desk but the teacher isn't there, notices that a student didn't do so well, this at best, doesn't matter to much to them, at worst, could lead to a lot of bad blood between the two students. Legally, if this incident got bad, the school would probably be at fault, as they left that sensitive information vulnerable.

However, when it comes to the potential risks of the openness of data, there are problems to the inverse, where only the teacher ever knows how well their students are doing and never shares that info has its own problems, if students and parents can't see how well they're doing they feel left in the dark, that the school is hiding something and that isn't good either.

In spite of these potential risks, its very clearly better to have data visualized and saved, it allows you to make better decisions not just now but in the future, and not just you but many others. This is the quality of teaching with LA and DV - https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/line-chart-going-up

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