Big Data in online education

Who produces value and who reaps the rewards?

Abstract

From classifying learners to predicting learner behaviour, the application of Big Data in online education has been vast. Besides the potential benefits of Big Data in education, it is necessary to critically engage with some ethical and social challenges that Big Data presents to the field of online learning. The increasing use of big data by large institutional actors and corporations raises questions not only about data privacy and ownership, but whether this data is used to genuinely improve learner and teacher online learning experiences, or primarily for commercial profits and institutional benefits. When addressing ethical concerns regarding the use of Big Data in education, critiques often follow a reasoning that is in line with corporate interests and neoliberal logic of marketization of education. Given the importance of the pursuit for democratic online education, the need for critical perspectives in the field is ever-more essential. This research tries to critically address the role and impact of Big Data on labour relations and economic fairness in online education by examining both corporate and institutional data practices in online learning. The study puts forward a provisional theory of the use of Big Data in two large online learning platforms (Coursera and Blackboard) using critical grounded theory. The core category of Exploitation of the learning community, the three constituent concepts; the Vendor-Institutional Complex, Use of learner generated value for profit, and the Behavioral monitoring and engineering; and the sustaining category, the Magic Trick, were the foundational blocks for developing an emancipatory theory that addressed ethical issues of economic fairness regarding the use of big data in online education.