Page 22 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

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Learning From the EU
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect in May 2018. That means universities in Europe and the UK have to reconsider how they inform students and staff of the personal information being collected about them, as well as the purposes for which it may be used, including any results of learning analytics.
Stevens noted that these conversations are much further along in the EU countries just by virtue of a different data tradition. The presumed responsibilities that govern- ments have relative to citizen protection are different in Europe.
“One of the open questions is: Will the EU conversation become the default stan- dard for responsible use of student data in the United States? I would prefer that the answer is no,” he said. “The EU conversation should inform what we do here, but the default strategy for institutions in dealing with data policy issues is compli- ance. What I worry about is that we will just move that default compliance to an EU standard, thereby obviating the discussion once again, instead of working through the responsibilities of educators. That is a more interesting and ethically conse- quential conversation.”
Is there an obvious place on a university campus for these data policy efforts to reside? “These questions typically fall to IT offices or institutional research offices, which tend to be organized around compliance, and are not set up to have these nor- mative conversations that must be had,” Stevens said. “Neither institutional leadership nor philanthropists are giving these larger ethical questions about data use the at- tention they deserve. We are having conversations about compliance and regulation rather than first principles and goals, which is what we should be talking about.”
David Raths is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018