From the 3 articles, the one written by Regan and Jess, highlighting the ethical concerns that come from edtech applications, stood out the most to me. I initially thought I had an understanding of how data is collected from students, however it was quite appalling to learn the level of data gathered from students at a very young age. As noted in the article, privacy is definitely a huge issue, as edtech involves collection of detailed information about students, teachers, families and administrative details about educational institutions (Regan & Jesse, 2018). While personalized learning applications can be beneficial to students, as it gears towards the studentā€™s learning styles, it shouldnā€™t come at the cost of them losing the privacy of their information online. Moreover, it was evident that the data being collected was very concerning in the sense that it seemed to be a form of ā€œsurveillanceā€ through an ā€œintrusive dataā€ gathering process (Regan & Jesse, 2018). Although this process might have some benefits to teachers, such as providing guidance on how to approach each child, it might cause discrimiantion against others. Under the umbrella of privacy, there are six ethical concerns associated with privacy emphasized in the article that include: information privacy, anonymity, surveillance, autonomy, non-discrimantion and ownership of information (Regan & Jesse, 2018). It is important that each of these ethical concerns be addressed separately to help protect the privacy of students. While I know we can not always have full control of how our data is collected online, we should at least be allowed to know what kind of data is collected in educational institutions, and how itā€™s used.

 

Regan, P. M., & Jesse, J. (2018). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data andĀ personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21, 167-179.Ā https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2