Hi George,
I agree that learning analytics, much like privacy in general, is a transactional commodity. In fact, I would make an analogy between LA and modern changes in medical care. There has been a clear erosion of confidentiality in the doctor-patient relationship that, I would suggest, can provide a helpful lens through which to view the use of learning analytics in education.
Consider the age old adage of patient-doctor confidentiality. Until modern advances in technology this convention was undoubtedly a beneficial one. Control over private information was valuable insofar as it limited access to personal information that was embarrassing or intimate. However, as technology has advanced the need to expand the number of people with access to medical information has increased. The reasons for this include increasing medical specialization, greater medical support, additional support and resources for patients, experimentation and studies, and ubiquity and complexity of medical insurance. In fact, by some accounts the number of people with access to a patient’s personal medical information during a basic hospital stay can often reach 100 individuals.
Knowledge of this fact can often be disconcerting to people unaware of this explosion of access to personal medical information. Yet even given this awareness I doubt few people would choose to revert to a more restrictive state of confidentiality. This is because the reduction in patient privacy has resulted in tangible and meaningful benefits for the patient and doctor. Think only of the importance of having specialists with access to your information in the diagnosis of medical conditions and the greater efficiency that result from hospitals’ ability to specialize roles. Furthermore, without greater availability of personal medical records many medical advances and research would not be possible. The reduction in privacy, then, has massive benefits for individual patient, his or her doctor, as well as the broader society.
The challenge for learning analytics, then, is to demonstrate that similar tangible benefits can result from greater educational exposure on the part of students and instructors. Undoubtedly, this is the Holy Grail that LA practitioners are working to establish. In the meantime, however, we should expect a great deal of resistance and criticism directed at learning analytics projects given that privacy, particularly in an area as sensitive as education, is not something we can expect individuals to forgo freely.