Data Mining Ethics at the RMAIR Conference

I had the pleasure of presenting my paper on ethics and data mining at the Rocky Mountain Association for Institutional Research Conference today. First off, my thanks go out to the conference organizers for putting on an excellent conference. And then my thanks go to all of the people who had kind words and/or challenging questions about it.

The paper looks at the ethical side of a growing force in institutional research and higher education management. Data mining and predictive analytics are increasingly used in higher education to classify students and predict student behavior. But while the potential benefits of such techniques are significant, realizing them presents a range of ethical and social challenges. The immediate challenge considers the extent to which data mining’s outcomes are themselves ethical with respect to both individuals and institutions. A deep challenge, not readily apparent to institutional researchers or administrators, considers the implications of uncritical understanding of the scientific basis of data mining. These challenges can be met by understanding data mining as part of a value-laden nexus of problems, models, and interventions; by protecting the contextual integrity of information flows; and by ensuring both the scientific and normative validity of data mining applications.

I'll be posting highlights of the paper in blog-sized chunks over the next week or two. For those who can't wait, the full paper is posted at SSRN with the rest of my papers, and the PowerPoint presentation is available through Google Docs (update: it turns out Google Drive doesn't support animations) YouTube If I get really ambitious I'll record the narrations from to the slides and you can get, essentially, the whole presentation.

Getting Students to Understand Workload

Last week, Jill Rooney published an excellent post on questions students should never ask. She duly noted the general principle that there is no such thing as a stupid question, a principle that, having worked at Disneyland while an undergraduate, I know to be false: "What time is the nine o'clock parade?" is a stupid question. The rest, however, is excellent, mainly because the questions boil down to questions that students should ask themselves.

Today she followed that up with an equally useful post on questions students should ask. It includes a question that I pose to all of my students at the beginning of the semester:

@jillrooney2 Single best question: do they have 135 hours to put into this course over the next semester? So few understand that.
— Jeffrey Alan Johnson (@the_other_jeff) August 27, 2012

Students frequently don't quite get the time required for a course; the refrain of "this isn't the only class I'm taking" is all too common. To help them understand that, I work out a detailed time budget for the course, using the three-to-one rule of thumb. That's 135 hours total for a standard three-credit course at my institution. For my Introduction to Comparative Politics course this fall, the budget looks like this:

	Number	Time Each	Total Time
Class Meetings	28	1.5	42
Final Exam Meeting	1	2	2
Chapters	9	1	9
Additional Readings	9	0.5	4.5
Lynch Reading	1	12	12
Current Events	16	1	16
Quizzes	9	0.5	4.5
Exams	2	2	4
Country Study	1	20	20
Group Paper	1	20	20
Office Hours	2	0.5	1

That forms the basis for a section on my syllabus:

Workload

According to the accreditation standards that validate your degree as a legitimate one, to receive three semester credit hours requires 135 hours of study, including not more than 45 hours in class. In this course, study hours are budgeted as follows: Class meetings (44 hours), Readings (41.5 hours), Assignments (48.5 hours), Office Hour Consultations (1 hour).

When I go over the syllabus, I make clear that 135 hours is a non-negotiable standard, and students should expect to do poorly if they can't put in the required time. If their time commitments don't permit that, I suggest that they should consider cutting back on either their commitments or their expectations for performance.

Since I started doing that (back when I was a full-time faculty member rather than a bean counter—but they're such glorious beans that tell us so much!) I found that  I receive fewer complaints about the workload, and when I did they were specific things that I needed to respond to, e.g., "We can't get this assignment done in the time you think it will take us." That's especially good to me, as I tend to think that most students who complain about seemingly trivial things usually either have a legitimate concern but can't articulate it in relation to legitimate standards, or they have unrealistic expectations. This solves both of those concerns.

Why the AIR Nominees Should Join Twitter

I voted today in the officer elections for the Association for Institutional Research. AIR is the main professional organization in North America for the people who do reporting, business intelligence, and assessment for higher education—my professional colleagues. Like most such organizations it relies on its members to serve as officers, board members, and committee members to function. The slate of candidates seems quite capable. I don't know any of them personally, though I've connected with one virtually (more on that below). Certainly, I am grateful that they've volunteered their time to make a great organization work.

I have been a member of AIR for about a year, so I hardly know the players in institutional research. But as someone who is active in the AIR LinkedIn group and who follows a fair number of institutional researchers on Twitter, I expected to recognize at least some of the candidates. With the exception of Ellen Peters, who is also involved in the LinkedIn group, social media users are absent. So far as I can tell, none use Twitter. Not one of the candidate's statements mentioned AIR's social media use. And that's a problem.

Inconveniently Untrue Inconvenient Truths (Part 1)

Richard Vedder, in a blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested "12 Inconvenient Truths About American Higher Education" that he plans on expanding in a series of essays. These claims, if true, are inconvenient for defenders of traditional higher education; Vedder suggests that these claims "suggest cumulatively American universities have a lot of problems." The problem is that they are mostly not true, or at least can't support the conclusions that Vedder reaches from them. Which is inconvenient for him and those who think the free market can do better with higher education than it did with mortgage lending.

Inconvenient Truth #1: College Costs Are Rising Both for Students and Society

This one we can't stop hearing about. Vedder maintains not only that tuition is up but also that "higher education absorbs more than triple the share of the nation’s productive efforts than it did when John F. Kennedy was president." I tackled the increasing cost concerns back in November, and have since updated the analysis (and made it fancy and interactive!). Basically, and assuming that my university is representative, costs haven't increased at state universities; tuition has gone up only because state funding has been slashed.

The increasing share of (I assume; Vedder doesn't really define "productive efforts") GDP, that reflects not a problem with universities but their success in the major goal of post-World War II educational policy: increasing access. The percentage of 18 to 34-year-olds attending college rose from 10.8% in 1963 to 23.8% in 2010. In 2010, 2% of those 35 and over were enrolled in college; in 1963 the Census Bureau didn't bother including them in the data. That alone accounts for most of the rising share of GDP. We allow more people to go to college today than we did in the golden era of the "American Century" and are somehow shocked—shocked!—to find that we spend more of our resources on education.

Is Google's LMS a Blackboard Killer?

The Twitterverse is quite excited about the news that Pearson and Google have teamed up to produce a free Learning Management System (thanks for the tip, Mike Krywy). OpenClass has the potential, some say, of breaking the dominance of proprietary software such as Blackboard and—well, I guess all of the ones that Blackboard has bought in the past decade—in higher ed. But with support built in by Google, there seems to be the potential as well to overtake the proliferation of open source solutions such as Moodle and Canvas (which Utah recently adopted).

I haven't looked at the features of OpenClass yet. My first impression is that this isn't big as it sounds, at least on the immediately. But there is long-term potential to change the players in the field dramatically, depending on what Google and Pearson do here.