Surveillance-driven Misrepresentation and Discrimination in Education Technologies

Abstract

As education becomes increasingly intertwined with technology, surveillance threatens students' freedom to learn without misrepresentation and discrimination. Learning management systems (LMS), such as Canvas and Moodle, are used for both in-person and online education to facilitate communication between instructors and students, disseminate course materials, collect and grade assignments, and administer online assessments. Learning analytics that use big data to optimize education are increasingly integrated into LMS. Privacy research has been focused on studying the implications of big data in LA, leaving the issue of interpersonal surveillance unaddressed. Instructors have the capabilities to see data about students' activities on the LMS, which my research indicates makes students fear being misrepresented. Those fears do not disappear when control features are proposed. Students fear that their privacy settings will lead to them being misrepresented for their choices. These findings about student concerns indicate how LMSs function as a surveillance technology. Another educational technology used for surveillance is the online proctoring system (OPS). Despite reports of discrimination and privacy violations on OPS when they were exploding in popularity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a gap in critical research about how surveillance and discrimination interact on OPS. My research about students with disabilities using OPS found that there is a harmful pattern of anxiety related to feeling watched and anxiety about being misrepresented as cheating. This matches surveillance theory based on prisons and schools as parts of the school-prison nexus. Surveillance in education technology is harmful because it creates punitive power differentials, has a chilling effect on freedom of expression, and inhibits students' ability to learn. I use exploratory speculative interviews to illuminate the design challenges needed to create a new digital intervention that fosters critical consciousness alongside appropriate information flows that engage in appropriate information sharing, clear boundaries, and lived experiences.