It’s our pleasure to announce the forthcoming publication of our piece “A Measurement of Faculty Views on the Meaning and Value of Student Privacy” in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education.
This article disseminates findings from Phase One of the project, for which we conducted a survey of United States faculty on their views of student privacy. The paper is a significant edit of the paper published in the HICSS 54 proceedings, in that it includes new findings and an entirely new discussion section explaining privacy paradox behaviors of faculty. The article highlights and abstract are below.
Highlights
- Learning analytics tools are becoming commonplace in educational technologies, but extant student privacy issues remain largely unresolved.
- It is unknown in literature whether faculty care about student privacy and see privacy as valuable for learning.
- Study findings indicate that faculty believe privacy is important to intellectual behaviors and learning.
- Faculty are making assumptions about existing privacy protections and making instructional choices that could harm students.
Abstract
Learning analytics tools are becoming commonplace in educational technologies, but extant student privacy issues remain largely unresolved. It is unknown whether faculty care about student privacy and see privacy as valuable for learning. The research herein addresses findings from a survey of over 500 full-time higher education instructors. In the findings, we detail faculty perspectives of their privacy, students’ privacy, and the high degree to which they value both. Data indicate that faculty believe privacy is important to intellectual behaviors and learning, but the discussion argues that faculty make choices that put students at risk. While there seems to be a “privacy paradox,” our discussion argues that faculty are making assumptions about existing privacy protections and making instructional choices that could harm students because their “risk calculus” is underinformed. We conclude the article with recommendations to improve a faculty member’s privacy decision-making strategies and improve institutional conditions for student privacy.
Access the Preprint and Survey
A preprint of the paper is in our OSF research repository. To support replicating and extending our research, we have released the survey instrument in is also available in the same repository
