FEDERATION FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Education Expert Calls for End to Click Yes to Terms and Conditions' Culture to Boost Data Privacy for Teachers, Students in Digital Classroom

Bonnie Stewart among leading line-up of speakers at Congress 2023, Canada's largest humanities and social sciences conference, taking place May 27-June 2

Implications of online learning have been simmering for years, but now that the digital explosion is here, it's critical for educators to take back control of the four walls of the classroom.

That's the message from leading education expert Bonnie Stewart, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at University of Windsor, whose recent survey of 340 educators across 25 countries found that despite an eagerness to know more about the data processes behind the digital learning tools now routinely used in classrooms, teachers have been left in the dark, putting themselves and their students at risk.

"The practices of our click yes to terms and conditions' culture are filtering into our practices with educational tools, where we tend to assume if our institution has approved them, they are fine. But with every click, every keystroke and every deleted search, we're giving away data that can be used to track and pattern our behaviours," said Stewart. "Our students are swimming in that world, we as educators are swimming in that world, and yet we don't fully understand the data extraction and privacy implications of that world."

Stewart will be sharing preliminary findings from her research into data privacy in the digital classroom as a featured speaker at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2023), Canada's largest academic gathering and one of the most comprehensive in the world, taking place May 27 to June 2 at York University in Toronto.

Billed as a leading conference on the critical conversations of our time, Congress 2023 serves as a platform for the unveiling of thousands of research papers and presentations from social sciences and humanities experts worldwide. With more than 8,000 scholars, graduate students and practitioners expected to participate, the event focuses on reckoning with the past and reimagining the future, with the goal of inspiring ideas, dialogue and action that create a more diverse, sustainable, democratic and just society. 

Based on her findings, Stewart is calling for change in the education sector to safeguard digital learning environments, starting by giving educators a seat at the table for a deep dive into data ethics. "Part of the problem is that institutional digital infrastructures have been cobbled together' from various corporate platforms, resulting in piecemeal systems for x, y, z," she said. "Most educators operating within these infrastructures have no clear understanding of who has control over the data extracted, nor what administration or software vendors are doing with that data."

"Most of us who teach understand the four walls of the classroom because we're trained from the age of five to know how that operates, how you behave and what the power structures are," explained Stewart. "But for the most part, these new digital and datafied' systems aren't transparent to us. If I bring my students onto a particular platform my institution has approved, who at the institution can see students' logins, or level of interaction? Who at the vendor level has access to video or audio we record? How do I know that student patterns of behaviour can't be de-identified and used against them academically, or to pitch them products or misinformation? I don't know because the policies are not transparent and often not communicated at all."

The research found that by design, information about data privacy remains siloed within IT departments, with faculty not having a meaningful seat at those decision-making tables. Stewart's study which explored the data literacies and practices of online educators from six different countries found that all participants were aware of the potential for very real data privacy issues for students and wanted to be involved in the conversation going forward.

"Educators see an urgent need for change and to start having real conversations about data ethics, because they want to manage their classrooms with a first do no harm' approach," she said.

Of particular concern is that without big picture oversight, control over data is falling into the hands of the corporate world behind ed tech, including rapidly emerging AI tools like ChatGPT. Governance policies are lacking input from educators and when they do exist, they aren't communicated well and there's no easy way to keep them up to date.

"We need to be demanding of our institutions, and quite frankly our institutions need to be demanding of our sector, that we gain more clarity, more pedagogically oriented, clear plain language in our terms of service," said Stewart. "Maybe it's time to demand of our vendors that we as a sector aren't going to sign their contracts unless we see this moving in a less surveilling direction, and we understand what's happening with our students' data and we're cool with that."

Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in partnership with York University, Congress 2023 is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Universities Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Mitacs, SAGE Publishing, and University Affairs.

Registration - which includes 200+ keynote and open Congress sessions, with a virtual attendance option for many presentations - is $55. Visit www.federationhss.ca/congress2023 to register for a community pass and access the program of events open to the public.