Amy VanScoy, Kyle M. L. Jones, and Alison Harding

Student Privacy in the Datafied Classroom

Facilitating Conversations with Campus Stakeholders

Amy VanScoy is associate professor at the University at Buffalo, email: vanscoy@buffalo.edu. Kyle M. L. Jones is associate professor at Indiana University Indianapolis, email: kmlj@iu.edu. Alison Harding is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, email:hardinga@umd.edu.

© 2024 Amy VanScoy, Kyle M. L. Jones, and Alison Harding

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.

Studying Stakeholders Attitudes and Behaviors around Student Privacy

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-18-19-0032-19), we surveyed faculty about their understanding and engagement with student privacy related to edtech and data analytics practices. We conducted a generalizable survey with 502 American university faculty from a variety of disciplines. We found that instructors care deeply about their own personal privacy and their students’ privacy and view both through the same conceptual lens. Despite instructors’ value for student privacy, their instructional practices often include choices that put students’ privacy at risk. This “privacy paradox” may be the result of misinformed “risk calculus” on the part of the instructors. They seem to assume that campus policies or technology agreements provide a greater level of protection for student privacy than they actually do.1

Next, we investigated how librarians, faculty, and instructional designers, as stakeholders in student privacy, can complement and support each other in fostering greater awareness of student privacy concerns on their campuses. Among many interesting results, we found a wide range of attitudes toward student privacy on different campuses. On some campuses, communication and engagement across many potential campus actors was encouraged. Others described a top-down approach to student privacy policy and practice that lacked two-way conversation. But most had an atmosphere of ambivalence on their campus, exemplified by a librarian who stated, “So I guess I just, you know, wish it was a more comprehensive and a more discussed topic kind of across the board.”

The librarians, faculty, and instructional designers in the study were asked to explain how they viewed their role in protecting student privacy and what responsibilities the other two groups had in that task. We found that our participants do not see themselves as having agency to impact student privacy on campus outside of their traditional sphere of influence. Also, there is a lack of understanding by each group of the roles that the other groups play and a surface-level understanding of each other’s jobs. Our participants were generally unable to articulate how the other stakeholder groups may have a role in protecting student privacy.2

Creating the Facilitated Discussions Workshop Toolkit

The findings of these studies indicated the need for conversations between these campus stakeholders about students’ privacy issues. Working with privacy workshop consultant, Becky Yoose of LDH Consulting Services (https://ldhconsultingservices.com/), we created a toolkit for use in planning a campus workshop on student privacy.3 This toolkit is designed to help easily plan and present a workshop that brings together librarians, faculty, and instructional designers to strengthen their understanding of the roles that each of them play in protecting student privacy and to allow them to develop actionable goals that will benefit their campus community.

The workshop toolkit provides step-by-step workshop planning. It begins with suggested learning objectives for the workshop, which include actionable, measurable outcomes while also emphasizing that this workshop is an opportunity to establish or strengthen relationships between peer groups on campus. To make the workshop easy for first-time facilitators, it proceeds with a detailed list of suggestions about the logistics of presenting the workshop—including information on the participants and facilitators, mode, space and material needs, scheduling, and evaluation. The information is formatted to allow for maximum flexibility and understanding that different institutions may have diverse needs.

The workshop toolkit provides guidance on preparing the content that is most appropriate for a specific campus audience. A variety of potential activities are detailed, including activities that foster inclusive participation, identify problems and challenges, create shared understanding, and identify future action plans. Each activity or exercise lists the main objectives and outcomes, the logistics, a description, step-by-step instructions, and potential variations or considerations that may make implementing the activity or exercise more fruitful for a particular group of participants. community.

In addition, the toolkit provides a sample facilitation plan and a checklist for what to do ahead of the workshop, template emails, recruitment documents, and scripts that a facilitator can utilize to promote and present the workshop. To give the workshop added context and provide the participants with an overview of the research on the topic, the toolkit includes a customizable slide deck for the facilitator to use to guide the introduction portion of the workshop. Included in the slide deck is a video where we summarize the Student Privacy in the Datafied Classroom project and connect findings from the project to the workshop. The workshop toolkit also provides resources for managing a workshop, promoting community guidelines, managing expectations, and even troubleshooting the flow of the workshop. One of the strengths of this toolkit is that it is flexible and can be customized to fit the needs of any higher education institution that is interested in beginning, continuing, or formalizing conversations about student privacy on their campus.

The Workshop Toolkit in Action

Teams at two campuses generously volunteered to test the toolkit, using it to plan and implement workshops on their campus. At Ohio State University, Senior Privacy Officer Jennifer Elliot and Head of the Teaching and Learning Department Amanda Folk from the University Libraries, along with Learning Analytics Consultant Marcia Ham, facilitated a 90-minute online workshop for 17 members of the Ohio State community. Cristina Colquhour, instructional design and online learning librarian at Oklahoma State University, facilitated a 90-minute online workshop for nine members of the Oklahoma State community.

The facilitators reported that the toolkit made it easy to plan and run the workshop. Calhoun said “The toolkit overall, I thought, was really helpful because it provided templates and timelines for each thing throughout. And just a guide of what to do, how to structure conversations and everything.” Calhoun is experienced in running workshops, but she still appreciated the convenience of a variety of activities already planned out. The facilitators also appreciated the flexibility and customizability of the workshop toolkit. The facilitators at Ohio State University used the toolkit’s recommended learning objectives but adapted them to their own needs, emphasizing that they wanted participants to think about potential and current problems at Ohio State and how they, as a collective, might be able to address them.

Feedback from participants in the workshop was positive. Overall, the Ohio State facilitators reported that the workshop was successful and had the desired impact of creating or continuing relationships between stakeholder groups. One facilitator stated, “You know, librarians and instructional designers and faculty don’t necessarily meet and have conversations, especially about this. And so there was a lot of energy at the end of the workshop. That was kind of like, it’s like a wave. You just want to continue moving forward with it.” Participants drew connections between privacy and their shared ethics and values, and the workshop became an opportunity to learn more about resources available to the campus community.

Feedback was positive from Oklahoma State participants as well. Calhoun said, “It was an awesome resource. It helped us facilitate some great conversations. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone kept saying throughout the meeting how glad they were that we were all there together to have these conversations. And that they wanted to continue it. That was the final thing that somebody said was, ‘So can we . . . ? What’s our plan here? Are we going to keep talking?’” She added, “I was surprised by how much they wanted to connect with each other!” Most importantly, the participants and facilitators wanted to continue the conversation. This workshop provided a great starting point for deeper conversations about student privacy and participants enthusiastically asked for future workshops to be held so that they could recommend to their colleagues to participate.

The datafied classroom is likely to become more complicated and challenging to navigate from a student privacy perspective, not less. With librarians, faculty, and instructional designers working together, sharing information and power, the competing needs for both access to and protection of student data can be balanced. We hope the workshop toolkit contributes to this effort. The workshop toolkit is available and free to use through an easy download from our project’s digital repository (https://osf.io/pcdky). Feel free to explore it and use the toolkit to facilitate your own campus workshop.

Acknowledgements

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-18-19-0032-19). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Notes

1. Kyle M. L. Jones, Amy VanScoy, Kawanna Bright, Alison Harding, and Sanika Vedak, “A Measurement of Faculty Views on the Meaning and Value of Student Privacy,” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 34 (2022): 769–89, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-022-09320-7.
2. Amy VanScoy and Kyle M. L. Jones, “The Datafied Classroom,” Journal of Computing in Higher Education (forthcoming), https://osf.io/kxnsy/.
3. The workshop toolkit is available under a Creative Commons license. Amy VanScoy, Kyle M. L. Jones, and LDH Consulting Services, “Student Privacy Facilitation Workshop Toolkit,” last modified March 15, 2023, https://osf.io/pcdky.