Privacy and Surveillance in Digital Courseware

The current generation of digital courseware, particularly that marketed under the term “inclusive access,” includes data gathering practices over which the user has little or no control. Purporting to address the affordability crisis in academic courseware, publishers have devised an automatic billing model that depends on group-based subscriptions in order to provide to students discounted materials, and, not incidentally, gather a vast amount of student data. The collected data are put to various uses, including product development, marketing, and learning analytics, the results of which are sometimes made available to the students’ home institutions - most often to the faculty in specific courses – as information about the students’ use of the materials. The students are a captive market: if they want to succeed in class, they have no option but to agree to privacy terms that allow for the collection, analysis, and use of their data. Students lose control of their personal identity, with no say in how much to reveal and how much to conceal about themselves and their learning behaviors.

The issue of privacy and surveillance in digital courseware deserves closer scrutiny by all involved parties: faculty, students, administrators, and librarians.