WaPo has a fascinating article on technology intersecting with college campus life:
“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”
It sounds like a classic case of mistaken metrics: attendance as a proxy for learning, doesn’t it? I have to wonder if the goals of the universities utilizing this technology, which reaches beyond Syracuse to Virginia Commonwealth University, University of California San Diego, Auburn, and a number of others, are being redefined by these educational institutions by adding attendance to modify the grades of the students, negative or positive. But how is attendance related to grades? What if the student is asleep, daydreaming, or otherwise preoccupied? If I were a college administrator, I’d be looking at this technology and wondering if we were being led astray. And is the technology guaranteed?
SpotterEDU’s terms of use say its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”
In other words, SpotterEDU is saying Aren’t we cool? Keep your eyes on the cool-ness! But the article notes that sometimes it’s indeed not working properly (and as a professional data pusher myself, I’m appalled that those stories exist), and I cannot decide if this is bad or good, since such problems are good preparation for students to learn the world is a lot more uncertain than some might realize.
But this analysis isn’t going to be as clean-cut as one might expect. Consider this:
But the company also claims to see much more than just attendance. By logging the time a student spends in different parts of the campus, Benz said, his team has found a way to identify signs of personal anguish: A student avoiding the cafeteria might suffer from food insecurity or an eating disorder; a student skipping class might be grievously depressed. The data isn’t conclusive, Benz said, but it can “shine a light on where people can investigate, so students don’t slip through the cracks.”
To help find these students, he said, his team designed algorithms to look for patterns in a student’s “behavioral state” and automatically flag when their habits change. He calls it scaffolding — a temporary support used to build up a student, removed when they can stand on their own.
At a Silicon Valley summit in April, Benz outlined a recent real-life case: that of Student ID 106033, a depressed and “extremely isolated” student he called Sasha whom the system had flagged as “highly at-risk” because she only left her dorm to eat. “At every school, there are lots of Sashas,” he said. “And the bigger you are, the more Sashas that you have.”
There is definitely something to be said for providing help to students who are often away from home for the first time. For the non-gregarious, trying to tough it out may work, but then again you may end up with suicidal students.
But I still find this addition to campus life ominous and unsettling. Part of college life is learning what works and what doesn’t. The closing of the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them means diminished results for those who come out of that school, with or without a degree.
Some of this is justified as a way to baby-sit “student-athletes,” but to my mind that’s simply admitting that it’s very inappropriate for educational institutes to host the minor leagues of football. We’d be better off dumping the entire NCAA Football program and get back to education.
So it’ll be interesting to watch how higher education changes as students, who are not criminals, are more closely monitored than criminals.
