Data Privacy Concerns

Whilst LA offers much promise, the literature review highlights a major concern namely data privacy. This has been raised by a number of experts in the field. Understandably students may perceive LA as an invasion of privacy as the monitoring and tracking of student online engagement raises the “specter of a digital big brother” (Educause, 2011, p. 2). The concern was highlighted at the first Learning Analytic and Knowledge conference in 2011 at which attendees were in agreement that LA “raises deep and complex privacy issues” (Brown M. , 2013, p. 3)

The below image is taken from a wall I created on Padlet. It captures some of the feedback I received from staff participants during the interview stage. This wall captures the feedback on the Ethical issues that surround Learning Analytics. Data privacy is a prominent issue when discussing any learning analytics issue and I felt it was important to raise this concern during the interview process. Please click on the below image to access the Padlet wall.

Brown, M. (2013). LEARNING ANALYTICS: THE COMING THIRD WAVE. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) , 1-4.

Educause. (2011, December 6). 7 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT FIRST-GENERATION LEARNING ANALYTICS. Educause , 1-2.

Ethical Approval 

Due to the sensitive nature of the study, getting ethical clearance from the D.I.T Research Ethics Committee (REC) was always going to be a challenging process. I was after all going to be analysing student data within the Institutes Learning Management System (LMS) and this raises a number of data privacy and protection concerns, some of which are addressed above with extracts from the literature.

Attached here is a copy of the documentation submitted to the Research Ethics Committee.

The documents below contain the information and consent forms that were distributed to staff and students.