Who is this session for?
Developer, Management, Professor, Project Management, System Administrator
Session description
How can we find middle ground between having too little data and students living in a panopticon? There's a lot of confusion and hot takes out there about what is legal and ethical to collect & present. Different vendors and tools have different policies, and laws differ depending on whether your audience is strictly in the US or abroad. And rules aside, how do you know when you've gone too far ethically?
This talk will briefly mention the relevant laws, but focus more on a pragmatic way of measuring student engagement with WordPress and Google Analytics / BigQuery without exposing student information to Google, avoiding making "anonymous" data non-anonymous by accident, and how granularity in reporting can affect privacy. It will explore how a content-driven website may be different in privacy expectations than other platforms (like an LMS) and how new tools like LLMs ("AI") can compound small oversights into very big problems.
Presenter
Lincoln Russell
Lincoln has extensive experience in instructional technology, community management, Web engineering, and engineering management. He's used WordPress as an engineer for 15 years, including professionally for the last four. He has lead engineering at uConnect, creator of the Virtual Career Center, for two years. Lincoln was the WPCampus housing coordinator in 2023, and recently led his 24-year old, 300-person social club Icrontic through creating a Board of Trustees modeled on the WPCampus process. He has lived in & restored his historic home in Detroit for the past decade with his husband Aaron and rat terrier Rocky.
Sessions
- General Lecture Session: Ethically using student engagement data in WordPress
Session video
Our sponsors
