Ethics and Learning Technology

It’s great to hear from Dr. Chuck Severance again. I took many of his Python courses on Coursera and find him to be an excellent instructor.

In this short video he addresses privacy and LMSes and how schools pay little attention to privacy issues regarding their LMSes. He mentions how the vendors control all the data, and we have been pushing the priority of ethics and privacy concerns back.

I admit that in my classroom I didn’t know how private my students’ personal data truly was. I just trusted in the companies that hosted the LMSes (D2L, Google) that they would not abuse the information nor use it in unethical ways.

Did your school board address student privacy when it considered which LMS to use? Is its privacy policy or privacy study public? Please share!

Piazza (LMS) Demo Session – My Comments

I attended a Piazza demo session yesterday. Considering the demo was only an hour and there was no time for clarification, my comments may not be entirely accurate. Please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes.

Piazza is a lightweight Learning Management System which is available at https://piazza.com. It is much less comprehensive than D2L, more like Google Classroom but with a nicer interface for students (in my opinion). Continue reading “Piazza (LMS) Demo Session – My Comments”