Open Education, Privacy, Security, and Safety: Call to Action

Synonyms

Control; Digital pedagogy; Open pedagogy; Ownership; Surveillance

Introduction: Privacy, Security, and Safety in Open Education?

In online education and especially in open online education and connected learning scenarios, learners and teachers are vulnerable. Their thoughts, their questions, and their learning progress are exposed to the public. Their statements might be archived and indexed by search engines and preserved over years and decades. They produce data points and they interact not only with a small group of peers but with a greater public. Often, learners and teachers in open education have to rely on proprietary software that they pay for either with licensing fees or with their personal data. To date, privacy, security, and safety are not a priority of policy makers, institutions, or single educators in the realm of Open Education. This needs to change.

In his 2016 article, Cory Doctorow states that societies around the world have reached “Peak Indifference...