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Education technology, while a godsend during the pandemic, may eventually leave behind “cookies” that can build a child’s behavioral profile, which could unwittingly shape educational opportunities and career choices, according to a new CSUN study. Photo by VioletaStoimenova, iStock.
Education technology seemed like a godsend during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has helped students stay on track academically, while at the same time giving teachers and parents ways to monitor a child’s progress.
But it may leave “cookies” — microfiles created by software or application developers to collect information about the user in order to improve the experience. These cookies may build a profile of a child’s behavior as they continue to use educational technology throughout their academic career, a legacy that may inadvertently shape educational opportunities and career choices.
Christine Walker
“During the pandemic, educators from kindergarten through college were looking for new solutions to ensure students continued access to learning materials, and many of those solutions involved educational technology,” said California State University Northridge marketing professor Christine Walker. Technology and Information Privacy Specialist at the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics. “The speed at which those solutions had to happen — the speed at which teachers began to rely on educational technology — opened a Pandora’s box that could have long-term consequences for students and society.”
Walker and a team of CSUN researchers examine K-12 students’ personal data risk and vulnerability, “Mandatory Technology Adoption and Adaptation in Education: A Looming Student Privacy Issue,” recently published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs. Her collaborators include Kia Bodendorf, a graduate of the Michael D. Eisner College of Education. Professor of Marketing Tina Kiesler; Georgie de Mattos, a graduate student in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Mark Rostom, an MBA student at Nazarene College; and Amr Elkordi, an electrical and computer engineering undergraduate student in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.
The researchers examined the adoption and use of educational technology in California public schools, as the state has some of the nation’s strictest laws and policies regarding data privacy.
What they found was confusion among school district employees about the use of technology in schools. Information technology workers focus on protecting student information, while educational technology professionals (teachers and administrators) focus on improving education through the use of technology. The research team found that this confusion has created a “privacy-security chasm” in schools, and there is a “growing interest in understanding student privacy as part of children’s digital safety,” Walker said.
School districts throughout California have policies in place to protect their information technology and data from security breaches and hackers. But few, if any, educational technology manufacturers have clear polices to ensure they don’t collect or track information about students using their software or apps.
Educational institutions have designated information technology (IT) teams responsible for purchasing and maintaining equipment such as laptops and servers. But when it comes to educational technology, these same institutions leave these responsibilities to teachers or school administrators.
“That’s where the privacy-security chasm comes in,” Walker said. “IT people are focused on cyber security and teachers and administrators are focused on teaching and learning technology for those specific purposes.
“Educators through EdTech are not necessarily focused on cybersecurity or privacy,” she continued. “They are focused on the teaching experience, and rightly so. The providers ensure that they only share and collect student data to help develop better teaching and learning software tools and applications. But they did not mention that they would share the data with their partners and partners, not necessarily to develop new educational technology. They just share it.”
That sharing can be especially subtle if a vendor is part of a global tech giant that has multiple subsidiaries with which data can be shared, Walker said.
“The information a vendor collects on students can be shared all the way up the food chain, and parents and teachers may not know what’s been shared or how it’s been used,” she said. “Information collected about a student in kindergarten or first grade, where they first start using edtech, can be added to and built upon as they continue to use educational technology throughout their academic journey — middle school, high school, and college.”
“This raises a number of red flags,” Walker says, noting that students often don’t limit their use of school-recommended learning apps and software to school-issued devices.
“Instead, they use mom’s or dad’s laptop because it’s faster, or they use their personal cell phone because it’s easier for them, and no matter what device they’re on, EdTech leaves cookies and collects information,” she said.
Because students and parents are told that any edtech they use is important to learning, they’re more willing to accept cookies that pop up when they start the program, Walker said.
“It’s part of the learning process, so you think someone else is protecting their privacy,” she said. “When students continue to do that in their learning experience, they’re attuned to the idea that someone else has privacy, and that’s not happening.”
Walker noted that the data collection process takes place during a critical window of time in a student’s life and can be used to predict future academic potential.
“Perhaps the student has learned that a parent has cancer. Their community was recently hit by a natural disaster. There was a riot in their town,” she said. “All of these can influence student performance, but an algorithm can’t pick up on these very personal experiences, the way a human teacher can, in building a student profile. But these ‘flashes’ remain in a student’s digital profile and, down the road, can be used to influence college choices and career paths. Algorithms don’t allow for individual whims or searches. It affects your ability to learn at your own pace and with your own agency.
He said the move to virtual learning during the pandemic has led to a flood of educational technology in the classroom.
“Teachers had to do what they could to keep their students learning,” she said. “If the pressure of the epidemic has subsided, now we have to take a moment and ask who is protecting our children’s privacy and what we can do to protect our children and their privacy.
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