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The technologies that support online learning are continuously evolving, providing instructors and students with a continuous stream of new tools, features, and functionalities for existing tools. During an online course, instructors and students generate and share a tremendous amount of data using these tools. These data are often created in contexts where privacy concerns and safeguards are similarly evolving and uncertain. This article discusses online privacy concerns and emergent solutions in online learning contexts where technology transience is present. It focuses on issues such as legal rights, issues raised by emerging educational technologies, and manners by which institutions, instructors, and learners might mitigate both security risks and the level of personal discomfort that accompany these risks.
INTRODUCTION
Online instructors and students generate a tremendous amount of data as a byproduct of their learning activities. In a typical online class, members access online materials, upload and download files, and communicate with other class members. These activities leave behind a trail of digital data, of which only a portion is visible to the class participants. The visible data, such as typed words and uploaded documents, are consciously shared. The largely unseen data, such as digital records of each user's action on a web site, may be logged in a database without the user's knowledge or awareness.
Further complicating matters, online instructors and students operate in an everchanging technological landscape. The tools that they use continuously evolve, resulting in a steady influx of new tools and features as well as new uses for familiar tools. Along with these tools and features often come new terms of service, as well as the possibility of new privacy and security risks. Keeping up with these changes and learning how to manage data privacy, online comfort and safety, and digital identities is now a necessary, though often overlooked, part of the online educational experience.
This article explores the tensions between technology adoption and privacy in online learning settings, with a specific focus on how institutions, instructors, and learners respond to operating in a dynamic environment. The first section provides an overview of issues related to privacy and technology transience in online learning contexts. The second section addresses privacy issues related to five currently emerging educational technology contexts: cloud computing; social...