The Ethical Issues Around Learning Analytics
Learning technologies, especially those relying on data analytics, are exciting but also present ethical challenges that deserve our attention and action.
Robert E. Carpenter is Deputy Chief Information Officer, Associate Provost for Analytics, and Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
In the Division of Information Technology (DoIT), his charge is to lead the business intelligence and student success technology functions to support UMBC’ s strategic imperatives and help improve its performance on key margins, deepen UMBC’s institutional capacity to use analytics and e-learning data to improve student success.
In the Division of Academic Affairs, his charge is to advance the development, deployment, and integration of analytics to improve student success, shorten time to degree, and to help better understand the impact of resource allocation decisions and to advise the Provost and the campus on the use of analytics to support strategic planning,
His position allows DoIT and the Provost’s office to function as more effective partners in the deployment of analytics to support UMBC’s mission and goals. Towards this end, Bob frequently works in partnership with many academic departments and offices across campus to identify areas for improvement; to design, fund, and execute pilot programs for improved student learning and success (that often use behavioral nudges) to assess the results and to scale and institutionalize effective pilots.
Bob’s academic research focuses on how information problems in capital markets create frictions that limit firms’ access to funds and how these frictions can amplify the transmission of monetary policy. His work has appeared in the economic profession’s leading academic journals, including Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, The Economic Journal, The Journal of Banking and Finance, The Journal of Money Credit and Banking, and The Review of Economics and Statistics.
Bob speaks nationally and internationally on US macroeconomic conditions, fiscal and monetary policy, the European sovereign debt crisis, banking and regulatory policy, and more recently how higher education institutions can use technology and analytics to improve outcomes. He served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond through the financial crisis as Senior and Lead Financial Economist in banking supervision and regulation, where he led an emerging and critical risks unit, and was Vice Chair of the Bank’s Risk Prioritization Committee. He currently serves as a member of the Executive Committee for the APLU’s Commission on Information, Measurement, and Analysis (CIMA)
Bob joined UMBC in 1999. He is a past president of the UMBC Faculty Senate, co-chaired UMBC’s most recent accreditation review, and directed and managed the university’s Self Study process. He received an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Michigan-Flint and a Ph.D. in economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992. His CV can be found here.
Learning technologies, especially those relying on data analytics, are exciting but also present ethical challenges that deserve our attention and action.
We asked several leaders in the EDUCAUSE community where they currently stand on the use of predictive analytics for student success.
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