Students’ Perceptions of the Ethical Aspects of Learning Analytics

This paper deals with the students’ perceptions of the ethical aspects of learning analytics (LA), including data privacy, students’ consent for data collection, and regulations. The existence of statistically significant differences in students with respect to gender, type of study and study year was investigated. The research included 295 Croatian students and was implemented using a questionnaire. Students are moderately concerned about privacy in LA; they want to be informed about the data collection and how the data will be analysed, as well as to decide which data will be saved. They think LA should be regulated using rules and guidelines but are unfamiliar with them. Special focus was put on the students’ attitudes towards saving information about their activities and using this data for LA, respecting the data type. Students mostly disagree with all data types being saved for LA purposes, primarily related to the history of Internet browsing and the content of e-mails, and the highest openness to saving for LA purposes is achieved for logs in learning management systems.