Ethical Considerations in Learning Analytics

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Learning Analytics (LA) is a discipline focused on students’ learning experience. Advanced data science methods are employed to deeply understand their educational process. LA tools can be valuable information resources for educational institutions because they facilitate monitoring and evaluating activities in various academic areas to improve students’ learning processes.

Students benefit from a more personalized learning experience and access to their studies. Teachers benefit from the tools’ support in identifying their students’ performance patterns. They thus can personalize educational interventions to improve academic results.

Besides these advantages, many more enhance the quality of educational institutions due to the large amount of valuable data that students generate, which LA systems store so teachers can retrieve, process, and use the information.

However, as in any field, ethics play a fundamental role in considering how this sensitive information is used, and institutions must implement policies governing its use. Electronic, audio, or video data collection devices record figures, responses, and other information, while others record physiological data and analyze people’s neural activity. Since this information is so vulnerable, institutions must know how to protect privacy and recognize their employees’ and students’ rights.

Isabel Hilliger, assistant professor of the Special Plant and Deputy Director of Measurement, Evaluation, and Quality at the School of Engineering of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC-Chile) who counts with years of experience in the field of LA, highlights three critical considerations to protect an institution’s data successfully:

There must be a notion concerning the research that has already been issued on the ethics of Learning Analytics, understanding that specific codes of ethics emerge with a consequentialist view, i.e., one that seeks to maximize learning improvement and avoid dropouts promptly versus the damages or risks that could be caused from personal protection. There are already written codes and academic discussions that can inform a dialogue at the institutional level from the perception of the organization’s educational actors, including managers, teachers, and students.

The regulation or legal framework stems from the personal data protection laws established by the constitutions of each country; these govern the educational institution in some way, circumscribed to a legal context. Beyond what is desirable from the actors or suggested by LA research, it is essential to comply with this legal framework and determine how it is operationalized.

The institution may have specific capacities and regulations; however, within the community, other organizations may have different preferences. Also, considering the rapid evolution of technologies, techniques that could not be performed in the past may now be established.

For example, the IFE Living Lab gives participants a letter of consent clarifying that the collected information will be converted into numerical values, and the team in charge of building databases from data collections must de-personalize the information.

Likewise, Joanna Alvarado, leader of the IFE Living Lab, comments that to protect people’s anonymity, the data collected passes through an anonymization methodology before transmitting the information. For example, instead of communicating verbatim what a student said in an interview, the response data would be translated as an impression (positive, negative, neutral) in the dissemination. Beyond being a novel tool, LAs enhance the learning and development of the student body. However, the students’ institutions must ensure that the benefits of implementing Learning Analytics do not compromise the ethical principles of education.

We invite you to download our most recent IFE Insights Learning Analytics Report: The Power of Data in Education to learn more about different aspects of LA. The IFE Insights are a series of reports developed by the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education in collaboration with experts from various institutions to report on topics related to educational innovation. Find all editions by clicking here.

Translation by: Daniel Wetta