By Natalia Gonzalez Blanco Serrano ’24
January 28 marks Data Privacy Day, which commemorates the 1981 signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty about data privacy and protection. Here at Northwestern, some faculty are thinking of individual data privacy year-round, not just on this occasion. Head of Assessment and Planning at Northwestern Libraries Mike Perry recently published new research on university students’ thoughts on sharing their data with academic institutions; the findings are conflicting, hinting at the many complexities within this new conversation.
The project itself was a three-year, Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded research project led by Perry and librarians at seven partner institutions. Through a series of interviews, surveys, and focus groups, the team set out to get a better picture on how comfortable—or not—students are with sharing their data with their respective universities in order to benefit their studies. Over the course of three separate phases of research, students largely showed cautious optimism with a desire to know more about the potential goals and benefits, but Perry and his team found that a student’s history with data privacy breaches can play a large role in determining these attitudes.
The research team developed three focus groups: one focused on moving library resources behind the learning management system (such as Canvas, the LMS Northwestern uses to manage all aspects of a course including syllabi, readings, discussions, quizzes, and more); one for the establishment of a library data warehouse; and one for geolocation tracking.
These different scenarios were presented to students at universities across the country, asking how they would feel if their data were used to suggest help dissecting an article if Canvas noticed it had been opened and closed multiple times.
Responses from students were hesitantly positive, trying to see the best-case use for each scenario presented. Some expressed concern over the idea that an LMS would be suggesting help to a potentially struggling student; some participants thought this could make a student feel worse, as if they were struggling so much that even their computer had noticed.
Although most students were cautiously optimistic—especially around the health and safety concerns that could be addressed with geolocation tracking—Northwestern students consistently found themselves defying the positive attributes of data sharing.
“The Northwestern data privacy focus group ended up being probably the most interesting focus group out of all 24 that we conducted because there was one student who was intimately familiar with the Jeff Sessions protests that happened here,” said Perry.
The protests, which took place in 2019, sparked national controversy after photos and names of students had been published by The Daily. This was a hotly debated topic because people suspected that the University used these images and information to bring disciplinary action to students attending (all of which the University later dropped). And because the protests were picked up by national news, students were also concerned about their images and information being spread further than the University’s reach.
Perry said that after the student shared this knowledge with the rest of the group, “any use of student data for even the most altruistic educational purposes became a nonstarter. For these students, the University had already violated the sort of trust that’s foundational to be able to do the higher order analysis about how learning happens and how we can better improve learning.”
It became clear to Perry and his fellow researchers through the group that if student data will someday be shared for the purposes of streamlining education, it will need to be done with extreme clarity and explicit consent.
“It showed that once you violate that foundational trust, you can’t build these systems that purport to be for the benefit of the student,” says Perry. “One of the things I’m really interested in looking at now is, can you then develop a learning analytics policy or a student data use policy that is based around consent and allows students clear understanding of how data will be used? And can a policy and system like that start to undo some of the harms of data violations like this?”
These are questions that Perry hopes to tackle in his next round of research. For now, he does not have high hopes for the quick integration of data analysis into undergraduate academics that is based around consent. But as technology advances, the potential for using educational data to improve learning remains an attractive prospect for universities.
Natalia Gonzalez Blanco Serrano is a Medill School of Journalism junior