Privacy in the Virtual TPC Classroom
The topic of privacy in the classroom is important for TPC stakeholders (Gurak & Duin, 2004; ATTW, 2011; Chong, 2017; Robinson, Dusenberry, Hutter, lawrence, Frazee, & Burnett, 2019; Gallagher, Meister, & Russell, 2021). Our professional organizations, faculty, and students are sensitive to the potential of privacy infringement during in-person, hybrid, and online courses. In a recent study of technology mediated communication by Gallagher, Meister, and Russell, students often confessed they felt stress and anxiety about sharing their ideas, being observed and recorded, and having something they created disseminated for others to see. These moments of visibility can be agonizing, full of fear and self-doubt, because during these situations we find ourselves under the scrutiny of others and the judgemental power surveillance affords to onlookers (Foucault, 2012). In these instances, our sense of internal privacy is compromised.
When privacy is in question for any classroom participant, the gaze of another can be uncomfortable when it lingers for more than a few seconds (Sargent, 2003). This feeling is especially acute for students when a question has come up in discussion, no one seems keen to answer, and they are trying to formulate something to say (or to finish their homework for other classes). It can also be painful for instructors who may be overly self critical of mistakes or misspeaking. Now, imagine for a moment trying to come up with something or making a misstep on camera, on record, in a video that will be shared on a course LMS. Though Sargent’s example experience of what Hoover, Crampton, Smith, & Berbesque (2018) call “surveillance anxiety” stems from watchfulness in the physical classroom, the same experience and anxiety is felt regarding virtual observation (Gallagher, Meister, & Russell, 2021). This situation raises questions about what privacy can look like in our current digital spaces, and what the impact of surveillance might be on teaching and learning experiences in these environments. These questions are even more palpable when we consider TPC virtual learning environments where observation is invisible and ever present.
In the TPC online class environment, instructors and students interact with course contents, discussions, assignments, and other participants within an LMS (York, 2021). All contemporary LMSs provide not only the opportunity for administrators, teachers, and students to see each other's activities, but they may also provide performance data capture, aggregation, and analytics for some members of the course, software developers, their affiliates, and third-party purchasers of the software’s collected data (Lutkewitte, 2021). According to Gursoy, Inan, Nergiz, & Saygin (2016), the analytics used in LMSs may offer robust data for the improvement of distance education; however, the data from these environments may also pose privacy risks to all participants in those environments.
In an online course, it is not uncommon for a student’s data to represent the student. In fact, in asynchronous online class designs, a student's data acts like a digital version of their physical body, what Haggerty & Ericson (2000) call a “data double” (p. 606). The double is a representation of the student made from the conglomeration of all their LMS activity and profile data. According to Beck (2015), much of a student’s data can be invisible to them. The amount of time they are online, the number of clicks, views, and page visits, their post and thread reads, profile visits, and the aggregated performance analytics that have unseen algorithms and intangible evidence that support predetermined benchmarks all coalesce in what Beck calls “an invisible digital identity” (p. 125). With all this information being collected, it is plain the risks LMSs can pose to privacy. Not only are students woefully unaware of most of this data—necessitating Duin & Tham’s (2020) call to educate everyone on analytics—the data is easily captured by many parties and may evoke the disconcerting sense that students’ electronic words and their digital selves may be captured and shared in online information spaces (van Manen & Adams, 2009). But, this issue of data is not only limited to students, it also extends to faculty.
York (2021) offers that the privacy risks created by participating in online TPC courses are not only for students. He states that “Widely-used surveillance technologies pose legal, ethical, and pedagogical problems for teachers of blended, hybrid, and online writing courses” (n.p.). Whenever TPC educators enter into virtual classroom environments, they are willingly submitting to surveillance and the collection of their data. Like students, an instructors’ data often becomes a representation of them as an educator. In fact, with the growing number of online courses, college and university administrations are linking their LMSs to new analytics capturing software (like Instructor Insight by developer ASPIREDU) to collect teacher performance data in the digital space. But what does all this mean for instructor privacy? Well, despite the best efforts of scholars like Gursoy, Inan, Nergiz, and Saygin (2016) to support the adoption and use of privacy protection methods, the risks persist in our LMSs. Not only do they persist, they have increased alongside the adoption of more data capture technologies and requests for vigorous, personable participation in the online learning space.
Researchers Duin & Tham (2020) have pointed out that because of growing data capture capacity there is a pressing need for TPC stakeholders to critically scrutinize and educate all parties in the digital classroom—namely administrators, faculty, and students—about algorithmic performance data capture and use. At this time, the careful consideration these researchers suggest is not taking place at scale. Many different kinds of data, intentional, unintentional, metadata, missing and invisible data all pose serious risks to the virtual classroom for students and teachers alike (Lutkewitte, 2021, p. 7). It seems that the human and machine gaze of our TPC LMSs may be as much a problem, influencing students and putting instructors at risk, as it is a tool to support pedagogical practice. Thus, we must consider our privacy in the capture-dominated virtual classroom and we must take care of the presence we ask ourselves and students to create in these spaces.
