Reflecting on my resistance to Stealth Assessment H817 Activity 7
Thursday, 9 Jun 2016, 15:15
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Monday, 13 Jun 2016, 14:30
·Write a reflective piece in your learning journal or blog about how
these data could be used to generate learning analytics, together with any
problems that might be associated with their use in education.
·Make reference to any occasions on which you have been presented with or
had access to any of these data during your own learning and teaching, and
share these experiences in the forum or in OU Live if they are not private or
business sensitive.
This is personal and is a means of achieving some closure on
my one and only known brush, as a learner, with learning analytics. I don’t
think I will advance much until I have exorcised this ghost – hence I’m not
even going to try to be objective about the uses of data. At the moment, I feel
I could not go much beyond the Rebecca Ferguson paper I took notes upon. This
is going to be my framework for ‘uses’ of big data in education. This is about ‘a
problem’. I still don’t know whose ‘problem it is.
About 2011-12, I was working on a PG Diploma on Mental
Health Social Work at the University of Northumbria. A pilot course at the time
involved distance teaching and learning on ‘Mental Health Law’. At the same
time I had just started in a role in social work as an Advanced Practitioner,
after working in Assertive Outreach.
The job was tough (and not right for me) and for lots of
reasons, I fell behind on my study but particularly on the distance course. I
had planned to cover it during holidays and breaks from work but they would not
happen until one month before the viva-voce
law exam. Just before that time, I
received a letter from the University to say that my recorded use of the
distance website for Law was insufficient and that I was going to be removed
from the module. There was no consultation – that was it, a decision entirely
based on the traces of use (or lack of them in this case) recorded by the
University’s LMS. In my view, this decision took no account of:
·The learner-focused reasons for delayed use;
·The realities of full-time social work;
·My own plans for autonomous control of my
learning and access to teaching.
It took an appeal meeting to the Head of Course, attended by
my manager, to over-turn this decision and that with little or no
acknowledgement from the original decision-maker that such decisions ought to
involve the stakeholder most concerned. The only reason given was the evidence
stored, and made available to the meeting from the LMS and which the original decision-maker still
believes, as far as I know, necessitated this decision.
After the decision was over-turned I worked, as I knew I
would (in my holidays), on the law blending online and offline elements of my
own preferred Personal Learning Environment. Although this module was ungraded,
the external examiner told me that I achieved one of the best scores and
performance indicators given.
In the end, this was all to nought. As my health turned to
the worse, I fled job and course (finishing it later at a lower level, because
I no longer was able to take the practice-based element necessary for that
level). In a sense then the ‘prediction’ from LMS data was correct, in that my
retreat from the law course contact (known via recorded page visits) might have
been the first step to this general disillusionment. At the time though it felt
like an imposed stressor rather than stress relief.
Maybe, that tells us only that data itself can’t make
decisions and, even if they form their basis: mediation of such decisions
without the benefit of personal interaction is hardly likely to look or feel
pleasant or convince one that it represented a step to meeting one’s own ‘best
interests’. These incidents were recalled to me as I read some of the early
documentation about the trials in ‘learning analytics’, of which this module
was an early experiment. Raising the issue of whether or not to tell ‘learners’
of the stealth involved in their surveillance still seemed then (between 2006
and 2009) potentially ethical – to stop learners getting the ‘wrong perception’
about institutional intrusion into data based on what they might have believed
to be their personal experience,
But this story is not about a false perception about
intrusiveness but rather about a belated true perception of an intrusion used
to guide idea at a time when it was almost too late to do anything about it. An
‘actionable insight’ indeed.
Were one convinced that issues in the use of power and control in
teaching were always issues in which a learner’s ‘best interests’ were served,
one MIGHT (only might) see an ethical case for them. My subjective impression
is that academic life is still potentially prey to actions that are based on
gaining power advantage – and not just in campus novels like ‘Small World’ or ‘Lucky
Jim’. Unmonitored power inequalities and stealth surveillance by one group over
another do not marry together well. Hence, I really believe in Rebecca Ferguson’s
(2012) view that the existence and dissemination of ethical codes and practice
guides is a necessity in this area as in many others. It cannot – it should not
– be delayed and it must involve all stakeholders.
Reflecting on my resistance to Stealth Assessment H817 Activity 7
· Write a reflective piece in your learning journal or blog about how these data could be used to generate learning analytics, together with any problems that might be associated with their use in education.
· Make reference to any occasions on which you have been presented with or had access to any of these data during your own learning and teaching, and share these experiences in the forum or in OU Live if they are not private or business sensitive.
This is personal and is a means of achieving some closure on my one and only known brush, as a learner, with learning analytics. I don’t think I will advance much until I have exorcised this ghost – hence I’m not even going to try to be objective about the uses of data. At the moment, I feel I could not go much beyond the Rebecca Ferguson paper I took notes upon. This is going to be my framework for ‘uses’ of big data in education. This is about ‘a problem’. I still don’t know whose ‘problem it is.
About 2011-12, I was working on a PG Diploma on Mental Health Social Work at the University of Northumbria. A pilot course at the time involved distance teaching and learning on ‘Mental Health Law’. At the same time I had just started in a role in social work as an Advanced Practitioner, after working in Assertive Outreach.
The job was tough (and not right for me) and for lots of reasons, I fell behind on my study but particularly on the distance course. I had planned to cover it during holidays and breaks from work but they would not happen until one month before the viva-voce law exam. Just before that time, I received a letter from the University to say that my recorded use of the distance website for Law was insufficient and that I was going to be removed from the module. There was no consultation – that was it, a decision entirely based on the traces of use (or lack of them in this case) recorded by the University’s LMS. In my view, this decision took no account of:
It took an appeal meeting to the Head of Course, attended by my manager, to over-turn this decision and that with little or no acknowledgement from the original decision-maker that such decisions ought to involve the stakeholder most concerned. The only reason given was the evidence stored, and made available to the meeting from the LMS and which the original decision-maker still believes, as far as I know, necessitated this decision.
After the decision was over-turned I worked, as I knew I would (in my holidays), on the law blending online and offline elements of my own preferred Personal Learning Environment. Although this module was ungraded, the external examiner told me that I achieved one of the best scores and performance indicators given.
In the end, this was all to nought. As my health turned to the worse, I fled job and course (finishing it later at a lower level, because I no longer was able to take the practice-based element necessary for that level). In a sense then the ‘prediction’ from LMS data was correct, in that my retreat from the law course contact (known via recorded page visits) might have been the first step to this general disillusionment. At the time though it felt like an imposed stressor rather than stress relief.
Maybe, that tells us only that data itself can’t make decisions and, even if they form their basis: mediation of such decisions without the benefit of personal interaction is hardly likely to look or feel pleasant or convince one that it represented a step to meeting one’s own ‘best interests’. These incidents were recalled to me as I read some of the early documentation about the trials in ‘learning analytics’, of which this module was an early experiment. Raising the issue of whether or not to tell ‘learners’ of the stealth involved in their surveillance still seemed then (between 2006 and 2009) potentially ethical – to stop learners getting the ‘wrong perception’ about institutional intrusion into data based on what they might have believed to be their personal experience,
But this story is not about a false perception about intrusiveness but rather about a belated true perception of an intrusion used to guide idea at a time when it was almost too late to do anything about it. An ‘actionable insight’ indeed.
Were one convinced that issues in the use of power and control in teaching were always issues in which a learner’s ‘best interests’ were served, one MIGHT (only might) see an ethical case for them. My subjective impression is that academic life is still potentially prey to actions that are based on gaining power advantage – and not just in campus novels like ‘Small World’ or ‘Lucky Jim’. Unmonitored power inequalities and stealth surveillance by one group over another do not marry together well. Hence, I really believe in Rebecca Ferguson’s (2012) view that the existence and dissemination of ethical codes and practice guides is a necessity in this area as in many others. It cannot – it should not – be delayed and it must involve all stakeholders.
There – I think that ghost is exorcised!