2024/05/20 by Easton Kelso, Kelso, Easton, Ananta Soneji +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information and Cyber Security #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.11712
openalex publication_date 2024/05/20 · openalex created_date 2024/05/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The education technology (EdTech) landscape is expanding rapidly in higher education institutes (HEIs). This growth brings enormous complexity. Protecting the extensive data collected by these tools is crucial for HEIs as data breaches and misuses can have dire security and privacy consequences on the data subjects, particularly students, who are often compelled to use these tools. This urges an in-depth understanding of HEI and EdTech vendor dynamics, which is largely understudied. To address this gap, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 13 participants who are in EdTech leadership roles at seven HEIs. Our study uncovers the EdTech acquisition process in the HEI context, the consideration of security and privacy issues throughout that process, the pain points of HEI personnel in establishing adequate protection mechanisms in service contracts, and their struggle in holding vendors accountable due to a lack of visibility into their system and power-asymmetry, among other reasons. We discuss certain observations about the status quo and conclude with recommendations for HEIs, researchers, and regulatory bodies to improve the situation.