Supporting Scalable Data Sharing in Online Education

Abstract

Online educational tools often generate learning data, and sharing such data between tutors and students can often improve learning outcomes. Unfortunately the process of sharing learning data today is not always transparent to students. Our aim is to improve the transparency and user control aspects of sharing data whilst maintaining the educational utility of data sharing between tutors and students. To do so, we start by surveying the possible methods of sharing data, and we use this to design a token-based scheme for facilitating data sharing. We implemented our scheme and observed it in use by 7,798 students over the course of one year. We find that our proposed scheme provides a good balance between transparency, user control, educational utility and scalability.