Education Week - October 22, 2014 - S8

S8 |
EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 22, 2014
n
Taking Stock of Personalized Learning > www.edweek.org/go/personalized
School Districts Wrestle
With 'Learner Profile' Idea
A
handful of school districts in the United States are wrestling
with the idea of incorporating comprehensive digital profiles
of students into their personalized learning strategies.
But they've yet to find the right software or other tools
to help make such "learner profiles" possible, said Eileen
P. Harrity, a program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which for the past year has provided grant
funding to six districts to think about how "next generation"
By
Benjamin
Herold
software systems can support personalized learning. (Education Week receives support
from the Gates Foundation for coverage of college- and career-ready standards.)
"I think [the districts] were hoping there would be one tool to do this, and they've looked at options
among both learning management systems and student information systems," Ms. Harrity
said. "It's a definite need in the marketplace."
The districts receiving the aid from the Gates Foundation are in Riverside, Calif.; Denver; Lake
and Pinellas counties, Fla.; Henry County, Ga.; and Dallas. In general, Ms. Harrity said, officials
in those school systems believe learner profiles should include information on what students know
and can do, down to the granular level of individual standards and concepts, as well as information
about their learning preferences and interests. The profiles should be constantly growing and
evolving, most believe, in order to capture new information so as to paint a more holistic portrait
of each learner and allow both teachers and software to provide more customized instructional
resources and teaching.
David A. Irwin, a managing partner for the K-12 education practice of Stamford, Conn.-based
Gartner Consulting, which is helping support the Gates grantees, likened the concept to the popular
digital-music service Pandora. That service constantly captures data on the types of music that
listeners prefer and uses that information to suggest new songs.
Technical Barriers
But there are barriers in the ed-tech market. Existing software systems tend to work only for specific
bands of information that are contained within the limited universe of a particular vendor's offerings.
To be comprehensive, any learner-profile tool would need to be integrated with a wide range
of existing learning management systems, student information systems, and educational software, a
task made enormously difficult by the lack of agreed-upon technical standards in the sector, as well
as by turf battles between vendors.
And Mr. Irwin said district officials aren't sure exactly what such a service would look like in
the K-12 context-an uncertainty that exacerbates the disconnect between educators and ed-tech
providers.
"I can't say we're at a point where we know what functions [schools] want. We just know that
they're not currently out there," he said. "I think it will happen when a district or school system can
clearly articulate, 'This is what my new teaching and learning model looks like, and this is what I
need to run that new model.' "l
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S6
students are going about it in the wrong
way.
"There are Silicon-era snake-oil vendors
that slot people into very crude pre-existing
categories instead of learning from
patterns that emerge in the data," said
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor
of Internet governance and regulation at
England's Oxford University.
And the most vocal concerns about
learner profiles come from those worried
about the privacy and security of students'
data-especially when it comes to vendors
like Knewton, which boasts about collecting
orders of magnitude more data about
its users than consumer companies such as
Google and Facebook.
"Data collection is just out of control
in the education space," said Khaliah
Barnes, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, or epic, a Washington-based
advocacy group. "Children
and families are really left out of the process
and have no control over their information
or how it will be used."
Part of the problem, Ms. Barnes said, is
the sheer complexity and opacity of what a
company like Knewton actually does.
When trying to visualize what the company's
learner profiles actually look like, it's
easy to imagine a spreadsheet or a Facebook
page or a manila folder with a paper dossier.
But in reality, the profiles that Knewton
currently builds amount to constantly
updating, mind-bogglingly long streams
of alphanumeric code that are tied to an
anonymous identifier. Much of that data
is not directly about the individual student,
but instead pertains to how his or
her experiences contribute to a virtually
endless series of probability calculations
that also consider the experiences of millions
of other students.
Even if it were possible to hit a button
and receive the complete data record
Knewton has amassed on an individual
child-company officials say it's not-the
resulting information would be so voluminous
and come in such a format that it
would be unreadable by a human being.
Knewton's data only becomes accessible
to real people, company officials say, after
it is whittled down and the relevant bits
are presented through a dashboard created
by one of its publishing partners.
(Knewton doesn't produce content or sell
anything directly to schools, but gets paid
by publishers to "power" their content
with its learning-analytics technology.)
At no point in this process does Knewton
hold any personally identifiable information
on a child, company officials
stressed. The company's anonymized
data are only connected back to specific
children by publishers or schools, they
said.
In the future, however, the company
hopes to allow students and parents to
create accounts directly with Knewton,
opting to tie their identities to their
learning data in order to gain access to a
portable learner profile they could choose
to "carry" with them from school to school
or district to district.
Ms. Barnes of epic is skeptical.
If the hundreds of millions of records
Knewton collects and the analyses it generates
are at some point being tied back
to an individual student, she said, then
that student's privacy is at stake-especially
if the information is being used as
the basis for important decisions about
what the student knows, how he or she
should be taught, and what his or her
educational trajectory should look like.
And that student's privacy is not being
adequately protected, Ms. Barnes maintains,
if he or she will never be able to
access or contest the legitimacy of the
PAGE S11 >
New uses
of data to
personalize
learning are
bumping up
against worries
about the safety
and security of
sensitive student
information
Balancing Privacy and Innovation
H
ow long should vendors
be allowed to
maintain and use
the information
they collect about
school children?
The question
cuts to the heart of
the tensions that define the digital
learning revolution now underway,
said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a
professor of Internet governance
and regulation at England's Oxford
University.
"Big" educational data,
new technologies, and
learner profiles have
the potential to help
personalize learning
in previously unimaginable
ways, Mr. MayerSchonberger
wrote in his
2014 e-book Learning With Big
Data: The Future of Education. Still,
he wrote that they also threaten to
"shackle us to our past, denying us
due credit for our ability to evolve,
grow, and change."
Not surprisingly, privacy advocates
and ed-tech industry leaders
see the issue very differently.
"When companies can keep stuBy
Benjamin
Herold
dent
information indefinitely, it
increases the likelihood that they
will retain outdated and irrelevant
information that will be used
to make important decisions
about the students," said
Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer
for the Electronic
Privacy Information
Center, a Washingtonbased
advocacy group.
"We've also seen that
when companies have
unlimited access to data,
they tend to want to use it for
purposes outside of that for which
it was originally provided."
In response, Ms. Barnes and epic
favor legislation that limits data
retention and requires schools and
companies to delete information
after it has been used for its initial
purpose.
Modern Tensions
But Jose P. Ferreira, the ceo of
New York City-based Knewton, one
of the companies making the most
expansive use of big educational
data, questions the wisdom of any
legislation that imposes time limits
on how long student data may
be kept.
"I think people who don't understand
this stuff should take more
time to think it through," Mr. Ferreira
said. "I think you would be
insane to tell a student, 'We're
going to make your own data disappear,
even from you.' "
As an example of the potential
negative repercussions, he described
a hypothetical situation in which
a student who has benefited from
a comprehensive learner profile
throughout her K-12 career loses
access to that information when she
goes on to college, forcing her professors
to start from scratch in attempting
to understand her strengths,
weaknesses, and preferences.
Part of the challenge facing policymakers
is that current laws are
widely perceived as ill-equipped to
resolve such modern tensions.
The federal Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act, or ferpa,
for example, generally imposes on
schools the obligation to ensure that
third parties do not use students'
educational records and personally
identifiable information for purPAGE
S11 >

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Education Week - October 22, 2014

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