A matter of trust: Higher education institutions as information fiduciaries in an age of educational data mining and learning analytics

Abstract

Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student's demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these data, institutions and third parties are able to describe student life, predict future behaviors, and intervene to address academic or other barriers to student success (however defined). Learning analytics, consequently, raise serious issues concerning student privacy, autonomy, and the appropriate flow of student data. We argue that issues around privacy lead to valid questions about the degree to which students should trust their institution to use learning analytics data and other artifacts (algorithms, predictive scores) with their interests in mind. We argue that higher education institutions are paradigms of information fiduciaries. As such, colleges and universities have a special responsibility to their students. In this article, we use the information fiduciary concept to analyze cases when learning analytics violate an institution's responsibility to its students.

More Than Figures on Your Laptop: (Dis)trustful Implementation of Learning Analytics

“…Also, academic staff are averse to the potential loss of academic autonomy when LA is used to judge teaching performance (Kwet & Prinsloo, 2020;Selwyn, 2020) or conform teaching strategies to allow certain types of data to be used as parameters to measure learning (Brown, 2020). Although the purpose of LA is not to track but to empower learners and educators (Selwyn & Gašević, 2020), the means to the goals of understanding and optimizing learning and learning environments (Long, Siemens, Conole, & Gašević, 2011) may appear to be hostile and therefore in need of control in order to fulfill an institution's fiduciary responsibility (Jones et al, 2019).…”

“…Trust can be a significant barrier to the adoption of LA. While privacy and ethics have been common topics, trust has only recently attracted attention in the LA literature (Jones et al, 2020;Jones, Rubel, & LeClere, 2019), focusing on either students or teaching staff (Jones et al, 2020;Tsai, Whitelock-Wainwright, & Gašević, 2020;Slade, Prinsloo, & Khalil, 2019;Klein, Lester, Rangwala, & Johri, 2019). The emerging literature suggests that students generally trust institutions to collect and use their data (Tsai, Whitelock-Wainwright, & Gašević, 2020;Slade et al, 2019).…”

Do They Even Care? Measuring Instructor Value of Student Privacy in the Context of Learning Analytics

“…Additionally, universities compete in a highly competitive market to attract students and demonstrate institutional superiority via rankings systems. If institutions can adopt data science strategies that help students achieve success (and reduce the risk of socioeconomic ruin) while improving their institutional reputation in the process, then data mining and predictive analytics seem justified (see [6]). But do the ends justify the means?…”

Privacy, Ethics, and Institutional Research

“…And they collect a large amount and broad range of information about students. Hence, higher education institutions have a kind of fiduciary responsibility to students, and their data collection, analysis, and use should comport with the reasons that higher education is valuable in the first place (Balkin, 2016; Jones, Rubel, LeClere, in press; Rubel & Jones, 2016). Linking the value of privacy to the purposes of higher education is not explicit in the AIR Statement.…”

“…In the last section, The Value of Privacy, I noted that higher education institutions have a special relationship to their students based on the fact that they hold themselves out as institutions that will act in student interests, claim that they will be responsible stewards of student information, have control over broad and deep student information, and conduct research on that information. This creates a fiduciary relationship, such that institutions have an obligation to foster trust (Jones et al., in press). That requires institutions to act in students’ best interest and to disclose information about data collection, analysis, and use (even when students might object).…”