Page 21 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

PRIVACY
learners as learners, not students, on the grounds that univer- sities have fiduciary responsibilities to students of a certain type, and a student relationship is a certain type of contractual relationship, which is reflected in the use of the term learners as a larger category. But it turned out that MOOC learners are easy compared to the data describing students.”
In 2016, CAROL worked with the nonprofit education re- search group Ithaka S+R to convene a group of about 70 high- er education scholars and leaders from a diverse set of schools and other education organizations, to think through what ethi- cal responsibility regarding student data might look like.
“Our inherent conceptions of student privacy and data secu- rity were built in a period of paper records, in which different strands of information describing students were not so easily integrated,” Stevens said. “Now we can combine any data an organization has about students in a digital platform, so that raises very large questions about what is part of the student record and what is not. Are card swipes in the cafeteria part of the student record — or completely extraneous? There isn’t an obvious technical answer to a question like that.”
Today, educators often share the task of instruction with multiple parties, many of which are for-profit firms, Stevens noted. For instance, Stanford uses Instructure’s Canvas learning management system. Canvas has a great deal of in- formation describing basic educational processes at Stan- ford. Whose data are those?
“We tried to frame conversations and make a mark in the landscape so that as these questions continue to be discussed, we won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” Stevens said. Referring to the effort at the University of California, he thought it understandable that large public systems would be further
along because they have greater obligations to be transpar- ent than private institutions, “but we all face these questions,” he said. “We can think about them in technical or compliance terms, but I prefer to think of them as a large ethical opportunity — what is the right thing for an educational institution to do?”4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018
UC LEARNING DATA RECOMMENDED PRACTICES
1) Ownership: Service providers will recognize learning data ownership and access as a right of the faculty and students.
2) Usage Rights: Through a user’s profile setting, the service providers will enable users to control the use of their intellectual property.
3) Interoperable Data: Service providers will provide learning data to the institution in recognized standard interoperability format(s).
4) Data Without Fees: Service providers will not charge the faculty, students or other university learning data stewards for accessing their data.
5) Transparency: Service providers will inform the UC about the learning data they collect and how these data will be used.
6) Opt-in: Students will have a choice about the learning data collected.
7) Service Provider Security: All service provider platforms on which student learning data are
stored will conform with UC and state-mandated security procedures.
8) Campus Security: UC learning data stewards will ensure that all faculty and student data are stored securely in conformance with university data security policy.
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