Big Data Comes To College; NPR, 7/4/14

Anya Kamenetz, NPR; Big Data Comes To College:

""So academics are scrambling to come up with rules and procedures for gathering and using student data—and manipulating student behavior...

Yet another set of concerns arises because a lot of the new educational data collection is proprietary. Companies like Pearson, Blackboard and Coursera each have information on millions of learners.

"This is not a new problem for science," Stevens says, pointing to pharmaceutical and medical research. "But it is a new fact in the field of education research."

A fact that raises big questions: Who owns this data? The student, the institution, the company or some combination? Who gets to decide what is done in whose best interest?"