Once upon a time, the school's performance your child was properly summed up in two, maybe three, newsletters per year. The maps are based safely in his student file, shared only with administrators of parents, teachers, and colleges. digital technology of today has completely revamped this practice, and academic information once private is now shared with countless people that you will probably never meet.
Is this an acceptable practice? According to Jose Ferreira, CEO of a six-year data exploration company called Knewton, it is perfectly acceptable, and it is also in your child's education interest. However, many critics still feel the data extraction is a widespread threat to the privacy of students
Knewton :. Data Mining Academic your child
You may wonder how a stranger such as Jose Ferreira could so easily access personal academic data of your child.
the answer lies in the large number of electronic products used by school districts today. Many school districts have stocked computer labs where students enter their personal login to access games, applications, the Internet, and so on.
Some schools ready on iPads or other electronic devices that encourage children to explore and learn on their own at home. Other districts provide students with magnetic stripe cards, they Swipe to the library, on the bus, and in the lunch line.
Most likely, your child creates a personalized digital track simply attending school every day. And just as likely, this path has fallen under the control of a powerful mining company such as Knewton.
Knewton has partnered with some major educational publishers, including Microsoft, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin, to the adaptive learning technology into the hands of millions of American students. In the words of the company itself, Knewton made makeshift concentration "data science, statistics, psychometrics, machine learning, marking, and unified learning stories" in one place to create custom digital lessons students on a "scale".
in other words, Knewton software quietly hiding inside digital gadgets that your child uses at school.
This collects data on school performance of your child by analyzing the keystrokes, wrong answers, correct answers, time on task, and a host of other input data. the information is stored in the cloud where teachers your child can access it.
Who can access it? Knewton, of course.
A Matter of Student Achievement?
Ferreira is neither shame nor apologetic for huge amounts data it has collected on the children of America.
"We literally know everything you know," he boasts. "We have five more controls on the scale that Google has." But Ferreira said he did not make the trip for the power.
student data is used by the software adapting Knewton to narrow the digital lessons that encourage student achievement. It's like having a tutor one-on-one integrated in the tablet or computer in your child, a guardian can differentiate instruction through, formative assessments in progress.
delivery of instruction Differentiation is a skill that classroom teachers spend years trying to perfect. countless hours of professional development are versed in the study of education differentiated, and ultimately, teachers are assessed on their ability to deliver.
It is difficult for a human to take to tackle 25-35 students, who all have different learning styles and levels of ability. Ferreira's solution: Give the task of differentiated instruction to a computer program, and see what happens
The goal is to ease the burden on teachers while improving the learner experience. . Certainly the concept is attractive. After all, the US has lost its foothold in the global academic ratings in recent decades. In 2012, US students ranked 27 e in mathematics, 17 e in reading, and 20 e in science worldwide, according to data for the International Student Assessment Program. For the country to maintain its identity as a superpower, most people agree that the overhaul of the education system is long overdue.
The ethical concerns surrounding Knewton
electronic information systems such as Knewton to bring to the table a host of often unanticipated ethical concerns. For the brainchild of Jose Ferreira, one of the main concerns of the public is student privacy. The US government restricts the use of encryption codes, which means that student data could easily fall into the wrong hands and be misused, abused, or even spread internationally.
Although the data were fully protected by encryption, it could still be sold to marketers and advertisers hoping to make a profit of children who have difficulty learning. America is no stranger to security breaches, and nobody wants to see a child prey to the evils of greedy pirates.
In the eyes of many Americans, privacy compromise is not worth the academic benefits leveraged by an adaptive learning software Knewton.
What other Ed-Tech companies are
Khan Academy, another platform for online learning remarkable, recently changed its information collection policy to appease users who were nervous about privacy concerns. The nonprofit organization, which, once admitted to a policy of "targeted advertising" is now claiming to defend the protection of students' privacy. Khan Academy does however still allows collection of information for cookies placed by third parties such as YouTube and Google.
Moodle is a platform similar to learning Knewton of which can be downloaded by teachers and students to create a share, the adaptive learning environment. According to Moodle's privacy policy, it does not sell user information, but personal information could inadvertently be seen by "volunteers and staff" who work for the company.
other ed-tech enterprises, such as data storage company eScholar and analyzing data Panorama education provider, does not specifically specify a privacy policy. the risk of sharing personal information with online entities such as -ci is that you do not know where your information is going or what might harm you.
When technology advances faster than ethics, questions will inevitably arise. It is true that large data gives great benefits. Knewton and Google are some great data collection companies we know, but there is much more that we could not know. it is equally true that we do not want our privacy exploited for purposes other than our own. The question we must ask is: How can we analyze the good from the bad when it comes to student data mining - or any data extraction, for that matter
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