Abstract
A Federal Court ruled recently that the US Constitution guaranteed students a privacy right that would be violated by a Cleveland State University (CSU) requirement that students undergo “room scans” before completing online examinations. The university framed its requirement for a scan as a conventional means to secure academic integrity, differentiating it from a search and its logic of presumed malfeasance. The case juxtaposed questions of coercion and students’ abilities to refuse surveillance against questions of suspicion and universities’ ability to prevent wrongdoing, both within a shared interest in equitable, substantive student learning. The Court understood the university’s policy to be indefensibly mechanistic, as a preemptive intervention and as a measure whose effects were unwarranted by its stated purpose. Furthermore, as the plaintiff argued, the scans extended implication in lost privacy rights beyond the institution’s unwarranted surveillance to the various classmates to whom individual students’ surroundings became visible. We use CSU’s testing policy to ask: Whose Surveillance? Software employed in distance learning (which combines human observation and artificial intelligence monitoring) complicates the interplay of learning and location, vulnerability and coercion, and embodied and dis-embodied intelligence. Proximity might heighten vulnerability in a conventional regime of analog privacy, but in a context of institutionalized remote learning the distance is the opening for the student’s vulnerability. The CSU case focuses ethical and epistemic questions on machine learning deployed to surveil human learning. It illustrates distance’s relationship with vulnerability and that relationship’s importance to the teachers’, students’, and institutions’ collective ownership of learning.
Presenters
Brian Bergen AurandDirector of the Center for Instructional Technology and Online Learning, Academic Affairs, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Maryland, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
DISTANCE LEARNING, ASSESSMENT, SURVEILLANCE, COERCION, PRIVACY, INTEGRITY
