The Power of Conversation: Learners Become More Cautious Sharing Learning Data after a Group Discussion

The ethical integration of the data generated by learners into educational practices is of great importance now that data-rich technologies are prevalent in education. Despite the common agreement that learners should have agency in deciding what to do with their data, existing ethical discussions focus on policies or algorithms, with limited attention to participatory learner practices. Participatory practices, particularly around informed consent, can support ethical and meaningful engagement with data sharing decisions. Using a novel experimental methodology, we explore the effect of group discussion on learner decisions to share their data. We found that learners become more cautious in sharing their data in and after a group discussion. The willingness to share is the lowest when these data are submitted to a government entity and for a collective benefit. Further network analysis of group discussions confirms the observed behavioural effects: participants consistently discussed different aspects of sharing learning data based on the context such as sharing process vs outcome-related learning data. The results suggest that educational data consent is contextual and that mechanisms for consent in educational technology may differ from those in moral judgement. The proposed method of interactive consent therefore not only contributes to theories explaining privacy and effective data collection, but also represents a new way of conceptualising and realising participatory informed consent.