And now it’s time for my second assignment blog post for my course on open educational technologies.

This week we are to take some time to study a provided graphic (not CC licensed so I can’t include it here), and choose one or more sections to focus on. Consider what relevant issues are taking place in your own context.

The points on the image in question that stuck out to me the most were the monitoring of students and surveillance culture, both seriously concerning in our current post-secondary world. But I asked myself, what about monitoring and surveillance of faculty?

As I considered this, I thought about the question asked in the podcast Between the Chapters: Ed Tech’s Dystopian Turn – 25 Years of Ed Tech: The Serialized Audio Version is: Where does the responsibility for the use of educational technologies lie? Often it seems like that responsibility ends up in the laps of faculty and those of us who support them.

Finally, the ALT Ethical Framework recommends mindfulness, awareness, and acting with integrity when making decisions about educational technologies. But who is making those decisions at institutions, and who is being consulted, considered, and collaborated with around these decisions.

And finally, related to all of this, what has been on my mind most lately is who has access to online course sites in our LMS, and how is this managed?

In my institution, we have a code of conduct and various institutional policies (only those high-level officially sanctioned creations can be referred to as policy) that discuss basic use of technology institutionally, but nothing around educational technologies meaning that issues of student privacy when using cloud-based tech to support teaching and learning, especially those technologies requiring students to provide personal information, is not addressed institutionally, nor I suspect by many faculty asking student to use said technology. And now with the fairly recent changes in FIPPA in BC, we cannot even rely on provincial law to have those conversations with faculty and others. But one issue on my mind just this last week Involves the question of who has the right to access LMS course sites.

As a result of a situation where someone gained access to a course site without permission of the instructor or knowledge of the students in the course site, we now have a policy-informed directive around LMS access, meaning that the only person who can give permission for access is the instructor, or “owner”, of the course (with a note that the instructor should be discussing with their students who is accessing the course and why). Not administrators, not support personnel, no one (except for the eLearning group who provide direct support to faculty and students) is allowed in without permission of the instructor. After all, if someone visits an in-person class, everyone knows they are there. Why should an online classroom allow for someone to lurk in the background?

But now we are faced with new considerations as we bring faculty into our unit to back-fill people on secondment, and think forward to the future when we might bring faculty in as visiting educational developers. How do we manage expectations around privacy in these cases? For example, if a faculty member is supporting a faculty colleague from their own program with their online course design, or with student support are we creating potential bias or conflict of interest? Something I confess I hadn’t considered until someone mentioned that their school does not allow for sharing of student information between faculty.

Therefore, we are looking at creating Confidentiality statements for everyone coming into our unit, statements that we can show to others across the institution to reassure people that our role is to support, not to generate bias or conflicts because we can see inside courses without others’ knowledge. If we expect others to adhere to ethical standards around access to online courses and student information, I think it’s imperative we model that behaviour ourselves.

I wonder why we spend so much time creating high-level institutional policies and new strategic plans every five years instead of engaging in ongoing meaningful conversations around ethical implications of not just educational technology, but post-secondary eduction in general. Perhaps in the future, out institutions, our faculty, students, leadership, supporting staff, should be adapting the ALT model to better understand what our responsibilities are in the world of teaching and learning.

References

Association for Learning Technology. (2020, October 29). ALT’s Framework for Ethical Learning Technology. https://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/what-we-do/alts-ethical-framework-learning-technology

Between the Chapters: Ed Tech’s Dystopian Turn – 25 Years of Ed Tech: The Serialized Audio Version. (2020). Retrieved January 4, 2023, from https://25years.opened.ca/2021/04/30/between-the-chapters-ed-techs-dystopian-turn/