Balancing student privacy with benefits to society? An informal pre-print for and request for feedback a response to a study by Ifenthaler and Schumaker

Joshua Rosenberg

2020/07/23

I am writing a short (around 1,000 word) response to a great study by Ifenthaler and Schumaler (2016) on student perceptions of privacy principles for learning analytics. I think the article is available here without a paywall: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-016-9477-y

In the spirit of the article, I wanted to post the article for anyone to provide feedback on it. Since it’s such a short piece, posting it as a Google Doc (instead of on a server, like the one hosted by the Open Science Framework) seemed like it would suffice.

Any and all comments are welcomed in the Google Doc here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13UZs-QokjZ_5VW1GtMkDl0z-bsPO60sPjiAIK3dnklg/edit

It’s a new topic (privacy) and genre (a response) for me.

I drew a lot on a paper by Lundberg et al., privacy, ethics, and data access: A case study of the Fragile Families Challenge, in which the authors wrote about how they balanced privacy with the benefits to society (science). I think that paper is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2378023118813023