Mitchell Stevens said that participants at the recent Asilomar II conference reached a “shared understanding” about the idea that students, colleges, vendors and others all contribute to the creation of data and that ownership does not rest solely with one party. “It’s important that all those parties that contribute to the product mutually understand what purposes data are and are not being put to,” he said.
Imagine if a college, using learning analytics, has determined that students of a specific ethnic background who live in a handful of zip codes and score a certain way on standardized tests are highly likely to earn a low grade in an important course -- potentially jeopardizing their chances of graduating on time. Should the college actively prevent those students from enrolling in the course?
That is an example of the type of dilemma researchers from more than a dozen colleges and universities debated earlier this month as they made progress toward developing a set of shared standards for ethical use of student data, including how the data should be used to improve higher education.
Asilomar II: Student Data and Records in the Digital Era was a sequel — both in name and scope — to a similar event held in 2014. Attendees, most of them administrators and faculty members, met that summer to discuss what researchers should do with data created by learners engaging with their universities through free initiatives such as massive open online courses.
Read the entire story on the website of Inside Higher Education. Mitchell Stevens, associate professor of education, was one of the organizers of the Asilomar II conference. He attended the first Asilomar conference on use of data in higher education research and wrote an op-ed that appeared in Inside Higher Education in 2014.
