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Commissioned by Doorpakken op digitalisering and SURF, Dialogic has conducted an exploration into the possibilities, conditions, and potential partners for an infrastructure for managing student data. Educational institutions and service providers collect a vast amount of data about students, generated through teaching activities, including data from (digital) learning materials, as well as from processes supporting education such as administrative data, educational evaluations, and enrolment and progression data. The figure below provides a schematic overview with examples of student data:
The GDPR provides students with certain rights regarding their student data, but these legal frameworks do not guarantee that the use of student data always aligns with ethical standards. Therefore, it is desirable to give more control to students over this data, meaning students have insight and control over the processing of personal data within the educational process. An infrastructure could potentially provide a practical and usable means for students to control this data. This would also be beneficial for educational institutions, as it would allow them to have a stronger position in the responsible use of personal data to improve the educational process. Furthermore, market parties could benefit from such an infrastructure as it provides a generic solution for establishing control.
The research has shown that an infrastructure can facilitate the registration and exchange of the basis and permission for the use of student data. It was also found that educational institutions lack complete oversight of the processing of student data. Therefore, the starting point for the further development of managing student data is to keep the processing register up-to-date.
For any follow-up on this exploration towards an infrastructure for managing student data, two key points need to be considered:
- Pay attention to the needs and added value for vocational education (mbo), higher education (hbo), university education (wo), as well as service providers. An infrastructure essentially consists of an agreement framework on the scope and manner of exchange and a technical system in which this is implemented. For the agreement framework, it is important that public-private collaboration across all educational sectors is guaranteed.
- Explore pilots for the exchange of student data for which there is no legal basis for processing. Current initiatives (and pilots) mainly focus on use cases where there is a legal basis for processing student data. For more experiments involving other types of data sources and use cases (such as learning analytics), it is important that pilots are explicitly designed for student data where there is no legal basis for processing.
Want to learn more about this research? Download the report here or contact Max Kemman.