"Big Data can radically transform education by enabling personalized learning, deep student modeling, and true longitudinal studies that compare changes across classrooms, regions, and years. With these promises, however, come risks to individual privacy and educational validity, along with deep policy and ethical issues. Education is largely a public service targeted primarily at minors. Participation is compulsory in most advanced societies, and in many ways, it is seen as a fundamental right. Academic success is necessary for advancement, but students often have little individual say in the process. For these reasons, it poses unique policy challenges that do not arise in other domains. Big data requires deep and constant monitoring of students, classes, and instructors. Who consents to such monitoring, and how will student or instructor privacy be preserved? Data also has immense commercial value. Who owns it? And who is permitted to profit from its use? In this article, I will discuss some of these unique issues, and I will outline some potential approaches that may be taken to address them."
Lynch, C. F. (2017). Who prophets from big data in education? New insights and new challenges. Theory and Research in Education, 15(3), 249–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878517738448
1. SUMMARY
The paper discusses unique issues involving big data, educational data mining, privacy and ethics in education surrounding four big questions.
a. ‘Who owns educational data ?’
Primary data are helpful and should be co-owned by the participants for future developments and reuse. Secondary data are usually built by third parties but should also be shared with the primary data owners.
b. ‘ Who can or must consent to data collection? This question should be based on current legal landscape and specific laws. Policies should be carefully designed in such a way that balances the legitimate for privacy and the flexibility for innovations. Consents should be legally acquired from students or their guardians without any use of force or manipulation. People should be comfortable with giving consents knowing their data will be protected.
c. ‘Who has the right to access stored data, and for what pur -pose ?’ First, data has to be shared professionally following laws, standards and best practices. For example, the paper mentioned that in case of models, not only the training data should be shared but also the steps for building such models.
d. ‘ What, if any, rights do students, instructors, or even educational institutions have to privacy or anonymity in their educational records?’ The paper puts an emphasis on contractual designs with considerations of stakeholders’ interests in mind including the participants’ needs for information protection.
2. STRENGTHS
The paper touches a very trendy topic - privacy. This topic is getting attentions as cloud computing, IoT and big-data analytics mature. Writing style is polished and easy to understand.
3. WEAKNESSES
The paper do not discuss much into the current solutions/attempts at solving the four big questions.
