Can Coursework’s monitoring of our behaviors be justified?

Is the function valuable to students?

For instructors, students’ studying activities may be important indicators for grading. They may suppose that these activities show students’ attitudes and efforts. Also, the awareness of being recorded behaviors may create some anxiety about grades and peer pressure for students, which may encourage or push them to take study actions.

Then, whether the encouraging or pushing power mentioned above is valuable to students’ future development? The answer should be supported by studies that involve human behaviors, psychology, pedagogy, and sociology, which also need long-term follow-up research and comparative data, but based on the current research I found and my understanding, I think it is uncertain.

Reading more pages and spending more time do help students get more information about the course, which increases the opportunities of gaining more knowledge and digging more into the subjects. However, being monitored to take study actions is not necessary for the purposes since more assignments or self-exploration arrangements may get the same effects as well. The possible influence I conceive is that taking study actions may be conducive to forming a regular studying pattern so that students can keep up with the instructors’ schedule.

Conclusion

See my comments on SapirAzurSecondEssay. You are both looking for the same absence of evidence, and you should probably work together to find it.

As I wrote there, I think the substantive problem lies deeper. What is wrong is as fundamental as a mistaken understanding about how human beings learn. There isn't actually anything functionally similar between teaching (whether first grade or law school) and "fighting crime." Surveilled "learning management" can't produce the value it seeks, and can destroy values we should instead be cherishing. It's useful to consider the difference between Canvas?Courseworks and this wiki, if only to recognize that there are multiple axes of measurement, which cannot possible be reduced to a single cost-benefit calculation.

Can Coursework’s monitoring our behaviors be justified?

To begin with, I believe that there is a need to make a distinction between commercial software, which directly connects consumers and businesses, and the software which mainly serves those institutions that assume important social responsibilities, like the government, schools, or hospitals.

The first kind of software serves solely the enterprises and therefore the purposes of collecting and analyzing our behavior data are mainly to make us more willing or even addicted to consuming. However, for the second kind of software, since their direct clients need to fulfill their social duties (even if achieving social welfare is not their exclusive purpose through the software), this kind of software can have some sort of justifications for using our personal data. Then the question is whether Coursework, as special software which serves mainly educational institutions, performs its “justified duty” well through surveillance?

Do monitoring and recording our behavior provide any functions?

Before digging into this issue, I had an intuition that there must be some great work they can do through monitoring us. The behavioral study is recognized as a science, which gives people a general impression that the data about our behaviors should generate some conducive effects.To my surprise, as I went through the coursework website and the canvas website (I read the instructor guideline, student guideline, and admin guideline), I didn't find anything impressive.

Firstly, as a direct user, I mainly use coursework to check the “Announcements” to see if there are any important notifications, download the syllabus and other files professors upload, watch the class recordings and submit my assignments. Also, most of my classmates and I do not take coursework as the main tool for interactions. Google docs, emails, and What's App are popular for group study. None of the functions we use depends on the surveillance.

Secondly, although the canvas website displays lots of functions, and it generates and presents all kinds of exquisite charts and tables, the only thing I find needs to be supported by our behavior data is the "Analytics" function for instructors. With the help of “Analytics”, instructors can view students’ weekly online activity data. The data is displayed as a chart with two rows: average page views and average participation. Average pages tell instructors how many pages each student views in a week. The participations include posting a new comment, submitting an assignment, editing a document, joining a web conference, and so on.

Therefore, the only function the surveillance serves is generating a picture of students’ actions of studying instead of their learning outcomes (which I believe can be presented through their assignments and exams instead of their online actions).

Is the function valuable to our study?

For instructors, students’ studying activities may be important indicators for grading. They may suppose that these activities show students’ attitudes and efforts. (Although there may be lots of instructors who don’t care about this, I believe that among all the hypothetical effects, this is the most significant and possible use of those data that deserves to be discussed.) As a result, the awareness of being recorded behaviors may create some anxiety about grades and peer pressure for students, which may encourage or push them to take study actions.

Then, whether the encouraging or pushing power mentioned above is valuable to students’ study? The answer should be supported by studies that involve human behaviors, psychology, pedagogy, and sociology. However, I still want to discuss it from my own perspective.

I tend to think there are two layers of issues that need to be considered.

The first is whether it truly boosts students’ academic performance?

Reading more pages and spending more time do help students get more information about the course, which increases the opportunities of gaining the knowledge, broadening their minds, and digging more into the subjects. However, being monitored to take study actions is not necessary for the purposes since more assignments may get the same effects as well. The possible influence I conceive is that taking study actions may be conducive to forming a regular studying pattern so that students don't push all the study tasks at the end of the semester, but to what degree it helps improve the performance is highly questionable.

The second is that whether students’ improved performance (if there is) benefits them in the future?

Assume that students do form a good study habit and it improves their academic performance, then will these have significantly positive effects for their future life or career? This is an even harder question to answer yes. From a hypothetical perspective, better performance seems to lead to higher possibilities of good opportunities for future developments. However, we both know that, in reality, there is way too much more than that between a good grade and a successful life, especially when the grade is driven by anxiety and pressure instead of interest.

Since the benefits from monitoring us are so uncertain in both direct and indirect ways, this surveillance shouldn’t survive the balancing test with students’ privacy and thus cannot be justified. Maybe Coursework will develop some new functions that offer some convincing reasons to justify the monitoring, but now, we should say no to it.

Although I use coursework as an example in which the benefits appear to be not enough for the justifications for monitoring us, I think when it comes to other situations like controlling crimes (e.g. “the Domain Awareness System” which allows the NYPD to track surveillance targets and gain detailed information about them), it may be different especially in those areas with high crime rates (although I need more data and research). Some may argue the violation of privacy and the abuse of police power, but it's also a balancing test that involves all kinds of consideration and studies in lots of areas, and I hope it does better than Coursework.

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