Whose Data? Which Rights? Whose Power? A Policy Discourse Analysis of Student Privacy Policy Documents

• In Event: 31.048 - Critical Perspectives of Organizational Governance, Administration, and Leadership

Abstract

The development of learning analytics (LA) data (i.e., educational big data) has resulted in an explosion of data about students and their contexts. Yet, current policies are limited in their usefulness for informing post-secondary actors of their rights and responsibilities related to LA data. To understand how data privacy policies represent data, privacy, and agency/power, we conducted a policy discourse analysis. Three common discourses emerged: educational records as static artifacts, privacy solutions as predicated upon insitutional responsibility and student agency, and legitimate educational interest as institutionally defined and broadly applied. We explore the assumptions, biases, silences, and consequences of these discourses and offer counter- discourses to begin a foundation for the development of privacy policies in a new data age.

Authors

• Michael Brown, Iowa State University

• Carrie Klein, George Mason University