When the world was forced to stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic, remote learning became the new normal for millions of students. Educational technology (EdTech) tools like Google Classroom, Nearpod, and Kahoot! allowed schools to transition the learning environment completely online for more than an entire year. While this 85 billion dollar market provided a convenient way for teachers and administrators to keep track of students’ progress, it also opened the door for data collection by other companies.
A group of researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University shared their findings in a paper that explored how educational technologies get into schools and what privacy risks these technologies pose to students. The paper, which will be presented at the upcoming ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, discloses that many of the technologies were unvetted before they were used with students, possibly leading to critical data security risks.
Advised by faculty members Marshini Chetty (UChicago) and Danny Yuxing Huang (NYU), UChicago second-year PhD student Jake Chanenson co-led the work with NYU’s Brandon Sloane along with a team of undergraduate students and a high schooler: Amy Morrill, Jason Chee, and Navaneeth Rajan.
“EdTech use isn’t going away,” Prof. Chetty stated. “There might have been an increased usage of certain technologies during COVID, but just because the pandemic is over doesn’t mean these technologies aren’t persisting. That means privacy issues are going to remain as well.”
Read more at U. of Chicago Computer Science Department.