Balancing Privacy & Presence in Post-Covid Pedagogy: A TPC Study

A Pedagogy Conundrum: Finding Your Balance

A laptop and smartphone showing the physical space of the changing digital classroom.

Based on this study and previous research, it is clear that TPC education is changing, and needs to change, for the pandemic era (Johnson-Elola & Selber, 2021; Firth, 2021; Gallagher & Vance, 2021; Harris & Greer, 2021). Our pedagogical approach for the digital classroom has been impacted immensely, as have the various asynchronous, synchronous, and hybrid environments. The rapid uptake of technology has complicated educational spaces and risks fracturing them to deleterious effect. Most TPC education stakeholders are struggling under a pressing need for two course features seemingly at odds with each other's existence: the need for increased privacy in education (York, 2021; Lutkewette, 2021), and the call for greater presence for engaged online classes (Stewart, 2017; Harris & Greer, 2021; Gallagher & Vance, 2021). These issues are further complicated by institutional initiatives for more technology and more presence in distance education, without clear policy revisions for data privacy in what has quickly become an epoch defined by mass data capture and surveillance. But, all is not without hope as our attention returns to questions of privacy in this situation and the subject of presence in digitized spaces. In the spirit of finding balance between these two concerns, I offer answers to the study's research questions.

Revisiting question one, I asked: What pedagogical changes have occurred as the result of making TPC more digital in response to the pandemic (especially those related to and/or affecting privacy)? The participants in this study indicate that collaborative and experiential learning have been weakened by the pandemic. To counter this weakness, ubiquitous reliance on new technology has been leveraged to fill the once physical classroom space, but with many restrictions, costs, and consequences for stakeholders. Further, the use of more technology has created exponentially more stakeholder data records that may pose many more risks and be just as harmful as it is helpful to our educational mission.

Turning to question two, I asked: How can educators balance increased privacy concerns with the greater need for human presence in TPC instruction of the pandemic era? To this question, participants offered that greater skepticism and inquiry into technology and the kinds of data we and our students share in digital courses must be a part of our new classroom agenda. Also, we must seek to revisit and revise institutional policies on digital information and privacy for data TPC stakeholders are producing as part of our courses. Faculty should not be left to fend for themselves on such a sensitive subject as data security. We have a role to play, and to that end, I promote a heuristic based on this study and a pedagogical response.

My heuristic for handling the conundrum of balancing privacy and presence in the captured classroom has five components.

For TPC classes,

  1. We must learn to teach data education and privacy management so it is understood and used in our courses to ensure the right kind of presence is made (Duin & Tham, 2020)
  2. We must study and follow proven privacy protection methods (Gursoy et al. 2016) and best practices for data creation and sharing, platform evaluation and appropriateness, data security measures, and data management requirements
  3. We must have stakeholder’s create data in LMS and captured spaces only for the purpose of successful teaching and learning, while supporting presence and sharing in other liminal spaces
  4. We must try to be transparent about data use and “data fate” (Marx, 2016) and exercise safe record keeping and deletion after required periods, and
  5. We must see all electronic data created by stakeholders as if it were public data (not requesting, creating, or sharing data that maybe personal or private)

Though somewhat of a tall order, this heuristic provides a sense of the goals and approach we should endeavor to take toward safeguarding privacy and creating presence in our courses. To help educators get started, I offer practical guidance to support the heuristic’s goals and to meet some of the pedagogical needs of our situation.

Though we may take away the goals of the heuristic and use them in our own unique situations, a few pedagogical tips from this TPC study that respond to our institutional contexts may help. Whether we are trying to ensure privacy and presence in a recorded physical classroom or an online one, all participants and myself use an LMS. LMS environments and institutional spaces constrain what we can do with regard to privacy and presence through their data policies and capture configurations. When using an LMS, we should learn what user data is captured, what happens to it, and how we can manage it. When working in institutional spaces shaped by privacy or presence policies and initiatives, we should follow the policies mindfully and seek guidance to benefit stakeholders. By nature, information put into an LMS or captured by an institution is stored and analyzed by many parties (Lutkewitte, 2021). We need a plan to ensure privacy is understood and maintained and the right kind of presence (that is not too personal or intrusive) is created by controlling what data is made and how it is managed in these spaces.

To meet the heuristic goals for a captured course, we must start by teaching students about the concept of data privacy. Most TPC stakeholders already know the potentially public nature of digital communication, but they do not know what information they make, where it goes, or how it is used; it is invisible to them (Beck, 2015). Educating students on what data is, how it's made, who can access it, and why they may access it can help them become aware of its sensitive nature in the classroom and prepare them to manage it. Teaching students to manage their data by:

These practices all work well to build stakeholder privacy. However, these practices on their own instantiate data policing which obviously weakens presence.

Paired with data privacy training, teaching students what presence is, its relationship with communication, and its value to the classroom is important for shared learning experiences. Study participants indicated that many digitized TPC classes have diminished collaborative learning. It is difficult to create classroom presence alongside data privacy in captured spaces. So, the way we teach students to create presence and value communication, sharing, reflecting, and accommodating others' ideas, must include how to be present outside of LMSs and captured environments. We must nurture student work and communication in liminal spaces that are not recorded or scrutinized. Spaces like

These types of digital spaces, as well as unrecorded physical ones (the quad, the library, a study room, etc.) should be acknowledged and encouraged as spaces to be present, to communicate, to collaborate, and to share learning experiences. Thus, instruction on privacy and presence can come together and meet heuristic goals. Teaching and learning both face-to-face in captured spaces and in online ones can introduce balance between privacy and presence that is good for stakeholders.

To conclude, I want to point out that the study which produced this heuristic and recommendations has its limitations and only begins to scratch the surface of these two concerns for TPC pedagogy. Firstly, many may see the small sample size as an issue. But, I see it as an opportunity; it means this research can grow and more educators can share their experiences. Next, since the pandemic situation continues to evolve, the timeliness of this work may seem fleeting. But, this too is an opportunity because as our social and technological environments change, so too must the topics herein be redressed. Further, I am only one investigator examining the relationship between privacy and presence in digital TPC. So, the perspective that I can offer is limited by my own background, values, and experiences, and those of the limited number of participants acting as TPC representatives in this study. We need more investigators and more voices from the field to continue this research.

Speaking of the field, this study only examined the experiences of TPC educators and classrooms. Therefore, there are a multitude of other communication and composition spaces out there who are not represented, even though the findings may aid in those spaces as well. Last, and perhaps most unfortunately, the lack of students' perspective in this study, I feel most keenly. I had intended to capture data from both faculty and students, but was unable to secure even the meagerest number of student participants. This fact seems to illustrate that during data collection the personal bandwidth of solicited parties was low. Even those who participated said they had a lot on their plates. With these limitations in mind, I call for continued, sustained research into the issues of privacy and presence in the post-covid TPC classroom. There are multiple areas left to pursue and this study is just the beginning. There is much to prove and much to offer to the future of pedagogical inquiry into Technical and Professional Communication and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Marci Gallagher for her voice contributions to the audio clips in this article. Also, Dr. Bremen Vance and his students, Joshua Delay and Michael Miller, for their help with the programming language. Their contributions were fantastic and any faults are my own.

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