Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library, and Kyle Jones, assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at the Indiana University-Indianapolis, have received the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Best Conference Paper Award for "New Methods, New Needs: Preparing Academic Library Practitioners to Address Ethical Issues Associated with Learning Analytics."
The award-winning paper is one of the outputs of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded Prioritizing Privacy grant. It reflects the results of a survey of academic library practitioners. The three-year grant for $249,198 was awarded in 2019 to support the development of a continuing education program to train academic library practitioners to comprehensively address privacy and related ethical considerations in learning analytics projects.
In their paper, Hinchliffe and Jones discuss how "academic libraries are participating in the collection and analysis of student data in the attempt to develop an understanding of how libraries contribute to student learning, the educational experience, and efficient operations of academic institutions."
Their work is grounded in the recognition that "learning analytics is loaded with ethical issues, which are complicated by privacy-related values espoused by library practitioners."
The work-in-progress paper examines emerging findings from a survey that identifies what ethical issues practitioners associate with learning analytics and the degree to which they are prepared to address such issues. Survey results show that additional and specific training is necessary to address the ethical issues that arise from learning analytics.
The Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) will honor award recipients at their annual conference held virtually from October 14 to 22, 2020.