Learning Tracking Data Analysis - How Privacy Issues Affect Student Perception on e-Learning?

Abstract

Research works from the past ten years have demonstrated that technologies could in many ways enhance learning experience. Meanwhile, technologies can also create obstacles to the latter. For instance, using tracking approaches on the majority of e-learning platforms to monitor learners' activities raises many privacy questions. As for learners, knowing that their personal data are being used, even for educational purposes, they could radically change their perception on e-learning technologies. This paper presents a study on privacy issues in e-learning, based on both existing research findings and an experiment that we have conducted with the participation of students from three universities in France and one university in Germany. The study covers two main aspects. First, it outlines various tracking approaches in e-learning. Second, it analyzes how the participants perceive the use of their tracking data and the related privacy issues. The major contribution of this paper is the awareness-raising of privacy concerns, which are often overlooked by researchers and e-learning content providers.

Aware, But Don't Really Care: Students' Perspective on Privacy and Data Collection in Online Courses

“…There was also no significant difference between genders in terms of students' awareness of their learning behaviours being monitored and recorded by their instructors. The researchers found that this was in line with previous studies about students' awareness of their privacy in the online learning environment (Doring, Hodge, & Heo, 2014;Lorenz, Sousa, & Tomberg, 2013;May, Fessakis, Dimitracopoulou, & George, 2012;May, Iksal & Usener, 2016;Yang & Wang, 2014). One possible interpretation is that, although students' ages were not known in this study, it may be assumed that most of them were from either the millennial generation or generation X, and were familiar with social media such as Facebook, Snapchat and/or Instagram, and therefore already knew about issues relating to users' data privacy (Gogus & Saygın, 2019).…”