Abstract
The main goal of this chapter is twofold. First, we seek to investigate university students’ understanding of learning analytics (LA) practices in learning management systems (LMSs). Second, we examine students’ ethical stances when raising awareness of such practices through a data visualization dashboard. The empirical work carried out involved deploying a LA dashboard during the 2020 summer semester at a university in Sweden. The LA dashboard was designed to raise students’ awareness about LA practices by providing students with visualizations of the data collected by the LMS. Our findings indicate that the students rated values such as trust, privacy, transparency, and informed consent highly. Although most of the students appreciated the efforts made towards transparency through consent forms, and expected to be informed about the collected data, few students read the higher education institution’s (HEI’s) data collection policy documents. We also found that the students’ trust in their institution is a significant motivator for students’ willingness to share their data. However, we believe that this trust needs to be safeguarded by HEIs and not used as a sine qua non condition for collecting, visualizing, storing, and using students’ data. The findings concerning students’ trust highlight the importance of not breaking boundaries to maintain trust and respect among key educational stakeholders (Beattie S, Woodley C, Souter K, Creepy analytics and learner data rights. Rhetoric and reality: critical perspectives on educational technology. Proceedings ascilite, pp 421–425, 2014). Furthermore, we also observed that students’ attitudes towards data collection processes and data usage are highly related to the context of its use and with whom such data is shared. These findings are relevant for the LA community as they contribute with insights that may guide policymaking, implementation of LA at HEIs, and the design of data visualizations. We end the article by discussing the implications of our findings regarding the privacy paradox and contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, Washington Law Review, 79:119, 2004; Slade S, Prinsloo P, Khalil M, Learning analytics at the intersections of student trust, disclosure and benefit. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on learning analytics & knowledge, pp 235–244, 2019), which are central concepts to consider when conceptualizing and designing LA dashboards.
Keywords
- Data collection
- Learning analytics
- LA dashboards
- Higher education
- Privacy
- Transparency
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Velander, J., Otero, N., Pargman, T.C., Milrad, M. (2021). “We Know What You Were Doing”. In: Sahin, M., Ifenthaler, D. (eds) Visualizations and Dashboards for Learning Analytics. Advances in Analytics for Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81222-5_15
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