EdTech Needs An Ethics Policy

Context: The privacy of students who use EdTech apps for learning is at risk.

Background

• Due to the Pandemic, online education has replaced conventional classroom instruction, leading to the high popularity of EdTech apps due to their ability to customise learning to every student in the system.
• Changing role of teachers: Forced to become facilitators in learning rather than content providers.

Risks in the usage of EdTech apps

• Privacy concerns: For learning customisation, apps collect large quantities of data from learners through the gadgets that students use.
  • Scope for intrusion: Collecting intimate data like emotions and attitudes experienced and expressed via facial expressions and body temperature changes.
• Violation of ethics rules: Limited applicability of informed consent as there are no proper primers to explain to stakeholders (especially children and their parents) the intricacies in layperson terms.
  • For e.g. Researchers dealing with human subjects need to comply with ethics rules that committees of their respective research organisations formulate, along with global standards.
  • Risk of manipulation: A 2014 study titled ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, wherein Facebook manipulated emotions of 7,00,000 users by changing the type of posts that were shown to the user.
• Legal gap prompting illegitimate practices: India does not have protection equivalent to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.
  • Private data collected by EdTech company can be misused or sold to other companies with no oversight or protection.

Way forward: EdTech companies would have to be encouraged to comply in the interest of a healthier learning ecosystem.

• Formulate an ethics policy for EdTech companies: Through the active participation of educators, researchers, parents, learners and industry experts.
• Issues of fairness, safety, confidentiality and anonymity of user have to be dealt with.