Big Data Comes To College; NPR, 7/4/14

Anya Kamenetz, NPR; Big Data Comes To College:

"So academics are scrambling to come up with rules and procedures for gathering and using student data—and manipulating student behavior.

"This is a huge opportunity for science, but it also brings very large ethical puzzles," says Dr. Mitchell Stevens, director of digital research and planning at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. "We are at an unprecedented moment in the history of the human sciences, in which massive streams of information about human activity are produced continuously through online interaction."

Experts say the ethical considerations are lagging behind the practice. "There's a ton of research being done...[yet] if you do a search on ethics and analytics I think you'll get literally seven or eight articles," says Pistilli, who is the author of one of them.

Large Ethical Puzzles

In June, Stevens helped convene a gathering to produce a set of guidelines for this research. The Asilomar Convention was in the spirit of the Belmont Report of 1979, which created the rules in use today to evaluate research involving human subjects...

Asilomar came up with a set of broad principles that include "openness," "justice," and "beneficence." The final one is "continuous consideration," which, essentially, acknowledges that ethics remain a moving target in these situations."