Student Privacy in the Datafied Classroom: Facilitating Conversations with Campus Stakeholders

Abstract

The student as a datafied entity in higher education raises challenges for educators, scholars, librarians, and other stakeholders in the educational community. Balancing the need to access and use student data with the need to protect this data from unnecessary and irresponsible access and use is no easy feat. It is imperative that all campus stakeholders inform themselves about student privacy issues and work together to balance these competing demands. But informing themselves about complicated issues is a challenge. We see academic librarians as ideally situated to educate campus stakeholders about student privacy issues. Librarians understand the power of data, as well as the need for its ethical use. To support librarians’ efforts to educate campus stakeholders, we undertook a project called Student Privacy in the Datafied Classroom to study the attitudes and behaviors of librarians, faculty, and instructional designers related to student privacy. Building on our results, we created a toolkit for librarians to use in facilitating campus conversations about the issue. Here we share a report of our work and information about the workshop toolkit.