Teachers should be wary of a “massive data extraction” driven by an expanding edtech market, an expert has warned.
Christina Colclough, a data and artificial intelligence specialist, also said the relationships between education authorities and private data companies should be interrogated, in the interest of protecting the privacy of students and staff.
Appearing at the World Teachers’ Day 2020 event, Dr Colclough was asked: “Given that you’ve done a huge amount of work making unions aware of the pitfalls of data protection, and so on, what do you think are the must-dos for education unions to protect their members in this area?”
“Capacity build, capacity build, capacity build,” she said.
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“It’s not just in education unions, it’s across all unions in all sectors, we really need to up the ante, so to speak, in relation to understanding these digital tools, understanding what are the building blocks of an algorithm, knowing what questions to ask.”
Dr Colclough added that the sector must also make “very clear demands” of the education authorities, to determine what agreements they may have with private tech companies around joint data access and control.
Asked what role education unions have in governing data systems, and how they can influence government to give them more say over the use of teacher and student data, Dr Colclough said: “I think what education unions really have to understand is that this whole edtech - so the technology of education - is such a huge market, predicted to rise to $285 billion in just three or four years.
“So when we have capacity built - so we know what we are talking about; we know what critical questions to ask - we should then start really looking into, number one: what systems are in place in our workplaces, in our schools; who owns these systems - is it propriety systems that have been brought in and just implemented without further ado?
“We should be working very closely, demanding very clear demands with our education authorities: why are they recommending or buying in these systems? What agreements do they have with these private tech companies around joint data access and control, for example?”
She added: “I was spooked recently at a Unesco event, where a representative from one of these edtech companies was giving a speech, and slide number two, I think it was, had: ‘We are extracting 50 million data points a day on our edtech’, so on students, on children. And I then asked him, I said: ‘Well, what privacy rights, concerns do you have for the children here?’ ‘Oh, our data is anonymised,’ he said.
“Well, we then have to be smart enough to know, well everything anonymised can be very quickly de-anonymised.
“So this is a brilliant case of: where are the education authorities in this? What demands do they have? And what demands should the teachers and the unions have in each and every learning institution around this massive data extraction?”
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
