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Abstract
Over the past decade or so, learning analytics (LA) has matured as a research field and as operational practice within many educational institutions, mostly in the Global North. Learning analytics is commonly defined as the measurement, collection, analysis and use of students’ data to improve students’ learning. Until recently, the main sources of data for LA were restricted to institutional datasets gathered from, for example, learning management systems (LMSs) registration data, etc. Since such data gathering took place within a relatively closed digital ecosystem, institutions held the responsibility to maintain student privacy and to restrict their data collection to that needed to carry out their educational duties. The increasing digitisation and datafication of higher education combined with increased commercialisation of teaching and learning support systems and applications, acts to destabilise this understanding of learning analytics as a digital ecosystem. Given these continuing changes, agreements with plat-form providers and the roles of social media, applications, plugins, and mobile learning in teaching and learning now prompt us to consider learning analytics as data ecology rather than as a ‘closed’ ecosystem. This paper first maps learning analytics as data ecology before illustrating the need to think differently about its ethical implications.
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Department of Business Management, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Paul Prinsloo
Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Mohammad Khalil
Independent Researcher, Oxford, UK
Sharon Slade
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Correspondence toMohammad Khalil.
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KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Olga Viberg
Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Ioana Jivet
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Pedro J. Muñoz-Merino
University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
Maria Perifanou
CODE University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany
Tina Papathoma
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Prinsloo, P., Khalil, M., Slade, S. (2023). A Critical Consideration of the Ethical Implications in Learning Analytics as Data Ecology. In: Viberg, O., Jivet, I., Muñoz-Merino, P., Perifanou, M., Papathoma, T. (eds) Responsive and Sustainable Educational Futures. EC-TEL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42682-7_25
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