What If Colleges Treated Students as Data Users, Not Just Data Points?

Image: Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” by Georges Seurat, 1884 Everett Collection / Shutterstock. Article by Rebecca Koenig. EdSurge – March 11, 2021.

Their noses are swabbed. Their exams are recorded. Their Instagram posts are monitored.

During the pandemic, college students are surveilled very, very closely.

The health crisis has introduced new forms of data collection into higher education, but these are largely changes of degree, not kind. For years now, tech companies have been selling colleges tools that collect information about how students learn, where they travel on campus and what they do online. Such technologies promise to detect patterns that can improve teaching and graduation rates, ensure safety and even predict who is likely to succeed.

But there’s also growing recognition that this kind of tracking can distort perceptions, like a pointillist painting. Stand up close, and you see little more than a collection of data points. It’s not until you take a few steps back that the full student—a complex human—comes into view. […]

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