The director-general of the International Baccalaureate (IB) has warned of teacher surveillance risks as learning programmes move online.
Speaking to Tes at the IB Global Conference, a month after the IB launched its Online Diploma Programme Pilot, director-general Olli-Pekka Heinonen said that “difficult ethical questions” around the use of data could be one of the challenges of the future.
The pilot launched in September of this year and is working with a small number of selected partners, aiming to “better understand the needs of students who may not be able to attend traditional brick and mortar education,” he said.
Talking to Tes about the challenges organisations and governments face, as more learning and assessment is moved online, he said there are two particular areas that could spark “very difficult ethical questions”.
Data could be collected from students to judge teachers
He said his first concern is that data could be collected “very easily” from students, including data sets that “might not be the ones that should be assessed”.
He added an example of this could be the use of “facial recognition” and observing whether students look engaged during lessons and “making evaluations from that kind of data” in terms of judging teacher performance.
“It’s already there, we know that that’s been done and it’s a very dangerous road.”
However, Mr Heinonen said he was “not a strong supporter” of regulation as a way of controlling data being used in this way.
He said that “assessment is, by nature, an ethical choice” and that it’s “always an ethical question” around what is evaluated in a person and their performance.
He added that safeguarding teachers online would be “more about creating the culture and the trust in the system”.
“In these insecure times, there is so much push to have control on things and data is one way of thinking that now we have control.”
He wants IB “to be clear that we won’t go in that direction”.
Questions around pupils who ‘flourished’ in Covid
Mr Heinonen says another “deep and difficult question” that the sector has to think about is around the group of students who, during the remote teaching and learning period, were “flourishing more than in school”.
He said these were the students who might have “difficulties” with “social connections, difficulties with bullying” or connections with their peers.
Mr Heinonen says the “ethical question” is: “Is it a good choice for those children to be in an environment where they don’t have to be in contact with others?
“Or is it part of the school’s role in socialising to help those students overcome those challenges in a supported and safe environment, which schools should be?”
“It’s a very deep and difficult question that we have to carefully think about,” he added.
Digital assessment gets the green light
Back in January, Mr Heinonen said IB was looking at how it could bring digital assessment to its Diploma Programme, telling Tes that the moment had come “for the IB to move into that area”.
After confirming at this year’s conference that IB would be moving to create digital assessments, Mr Heinonen said that Covid had “magnified the understanding that we need to have more flexibilities of what we’re assessing in the future and paper-based assessment has pretty strong limitations in doing that”.
Dr Nicole Bien, chief schools officer at IB, told Tes “there will always be teachers who are not quite ready” and that there are concerns about how the “transition from paper to digital” would happen.
But she added that this was something that IB was “working through internally” and looking at how to offer digital assessment in “a way that does not put more stress on schools”.
“It’s not just about putting the paper on screen, but it’s really thinking through that whole rollout process, and also familiarity, before we actually even introduce it.”
