Dive Brief:
- Faculty members at Our Lady of the Lake University are crying foul after noticing administrators adding themselves to course rosters to get access to learning management system content and communication.
- Inside Higher Ed reports the university claims to have informed faculty and said the access is necessary to accomplish administrative tasks like collecting data for accreditation, following up on student complaints or developing courses.
- Faculty concerns revolve around academic freedom, and some onlookers expect the monitoring to curtail instructor use of the learning management system to protect their course privacy.
Dive Insight:
Our Lady of the Lake University’s monitoring scandal is not the first of the year. The University of California at Berkeley faced a serious backlash against network monitoring enacted across the University of California system in response to a data breach. In both situations, better communication may have prevented at least a portion of the outrage.
Faculty expect to be included in campus decision-making. When they are left out of the process, the breakdown in trust has long-lasting consequences. While in both cases the monitoring is legal, the question of ethics may come back to haunt administrators.