Learning Analytics in Small-scale Teacher-led Innovations: Ethical and Data Privacy Issues

Abstract

ABSTRACT:As a further step towards maturity, the field of learning analytics (LA) is working on the definition of frameworks that structure the legal and ethical issues that scholars and practitioners must take into account when planning and applying LA solutions to their learning contexts. However, current efforts in this direction tend to be focused on institutional higher education approaches. This paper reflects on the need to extend these ethical frameworks to cover other approaches to LA; more concretely, small-scale classroomoriented approaches that aim to support teachers in their practice. This reflection is based on three studies where we applied our teacher-led learning analytics approach in higher education and primary school contexts. We describe the ethical issues that emerged in these learning scenarios, and discuss them according to three dimensions: the overall learning analytics approach, the particular solution to learning analytics adopted, and the educational contexts where the analytics are applied. We see this effort as a first step towards the wider objective of providing a more comprehensive and adapted ethical framework to learning analytics that is able to address the needs of different learning analytics approaches and educational contexts.

Guest Editorial: Ethics and Privacy in Learning Analytics

“…Educational institutions should protect the rights and interests of their staff and students; educators should safeguard their students. How this safeguarding is carried out depends on context, but it should include some mechanism for complaint and the correction of errors (Rodríguez-Triana, et al, 2016).…”

“…The Code of 1 http://www.laceproject.eu/ethics-privacy-learning-analytics/ 2 http://www.laceproject.eu/learning-analytics-review/ Practice for Learning Analytics that emerged as a result (Sclater & Bailey, 2015) was informed and shaped by the EP4LA workshops (Sclater, 2016). That development process continues in this special issue, which proposes amendments to the Code of Practice when applied in school settings (Rodríguez-Triana, Martínez-Monés, & Villagrá-Sobrino, 2016). These are currently under consideration by the Code's authors.…”

Orchestrating learning analytics (OrLA): Supporting inter-stakeholder communication about adoption of learning analytics at the classroom

“…Many of these codes of practice have indeed a strong focus on ethics in the application of LA (Pardo & Siemens, 2014;Rodríguez-Triana, Martínez-Monés, & Villagrá-Sobrino, 2016;Sclater, 2014;Sclater & Bailey, 2015;Slade & Prinsloo, 2013).…”

“…We can also find references to the aforementioned appraisal of costs and benefits of LA, indicating the importance of engaging practitioners and other stakeholders so that they can clearly see the potential and tradeoffs of LA (Gunn et al, 2015). Others have also mentioned how finding synergies with existing technologies and practices can also be key in better perceiving LA's benefits (Rodríguez-Triana et al, 2016).…”

“…Pedagogical guidelines are mentioned in these codes of practice, related not only to the use of the technology, but also the pedagogical practices themselves (Pardo & Siemens, 2014;Sclater, 2014;Sclater & Bailey, 2015;Slade & Prinsloo, 2013;Wise, 2014). It is worth mentioning that contextual constraints and challenges (from identifying meaningful data sources, to adapting the solutions to the local workload limitations and learning goals) also feature prominently in some of these sources (Rodríguez-Triana et al, 2016).…”