Abstract
The recent trend in the development of education across the globe is the use of the new Learning Analytics (LA) tools and technologies in teaching and learning. The potential benefits of LA notwithstanding, potential ethical issues have to be considered and addressed in order to avoid any legal issues that might arise from its use. As a result of this, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) involved in the development of LA tools need to pay particular attention to every ethical challenges/constraint that might arise. This paper aims to identify and discuss several ethical issues connected with the practice and use of LA tools and technologies in analysing and predicting the performance of students in a shared network environment of HEIs. The study discusses the four ethical issues of Information and Communication Technology namely Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility (PAPA’s Model) as well as other approaches to explain these future concerns. The paper also presents the empirical evidence of the views of students on the analytical use and storage of their data. The results indicate that even though students have high trust in the privacy and security of their data being used by their institutions, more than half of the students have ethical concerns with the accessibility and storage of their data beyond a certain period. In the light of this, generalised strategies on ethical issues of the use of learners’ data in an HEI shared networked environment are proposed.
Highlights
Learning analytics is an emerging technology that is becoming of great use in various areas of education - from the pre-school level to the tertiary level education
Policy framework development: Presently in the UK, only 10% of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have adopted a code of practice or policy on the ethical use of data [14] and in order to avoid ethical breaches in the use of Learning Analytics (LA) in a shared environment, new policies relating to intellectual property rights (IPR) issues should be developed by HEIs
The uptake and use of LA is expanding and as such the ethical issues related to LA practice need to be considered and addressed
Summary
Learning analytics is an emerging technology that is becoming of great use in various areas of education - from the pre-school level to the tertiary level education. Ethical issues need to be considered with implementing LA tools especially that HEs have systems that link students' demographic data with their educational performance data as well as their interaction with online learning resources to predict their future performance or even recommend material for them [29]. According to [24], the present legal framework in HE cannot handle properly the issues of ethics, security and privacy concerns that might arise within LA in the future It will, be of great benefit to identify these challenges and find solutions to them at an early stage of development before they become more difficult to address later. The findings from the study might help to facilitate the development of a general policy framework for LA ethics in HE, facilitate training programs for students and other stakeholders as well as help in improving the design of LA tools and technologies to be more ethically complaint
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