Seven principles to foster privacy and security in educational tools: Local Educational Data Analytics

The New Learning Context (NCA for its initials in Spanish, Nuevo Contexto de Aprendizaje) is the new pedagogical framework that is being designed and implemented at the La Salle Institutions since 2017. The main objective is to deploy the pedagogical design across all educational centers and stages. In the context of NCA, digital technology is another pillar in the educational structure, that is integrated into classrooms as both support and the means to develop learning competences. This integration of digital educational technology in schools and universities transforms learning contexts, but it also creates risks for all educational roles in terms of privacy and data security that must be addressed. In the last 9 years, technology adoption has been accompanied by a data-driven model of analysis and decision-making, as well as a migration to cloud computing. Cloud computing adds to this technological transformation the ubiquity of data, personal data, and metadata. This implies in many cases that third parties collect and process educational data from all the actors involved in the teaching-learning process on remote servers and data centers, outside the control of educational institutions. So this latest technology adoption unfortunately also facilitates leaks, misuse, and improper access to all data collected. In this paper, we propose seven principles as a fundamental framework for NCA, that we have called Local Educational Data Analytics (LEDA). Our aim is to solve or minimize the negative impact of the use of this educational technology, which is based on cloud computing and uses integrated data analysis processes. We also propose both technological solutions that comply with the framework and lines of research that will be incorporated into the NCA pilot tests during the academic year 20-21.