Colleges monitoring students through Wi-Fi networks

[Innisfree]

Apparently a lot of schools are starting to use their Wi-Fi networks to keep track of whether students go to class, the library, the dining hall, and so on.

Quote

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full....

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/24/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-locations-hundreds-thousands/

It sounds like the practice started as a way of making sure college athletes were going to class, and has expanded to encompass entire student bodies. I had not heard of this. While I'm sure they can influence behavior, I dislike the whole idea.

Thoughts?

Edited December 26, 2019 by Innisfree

[JustEm]

I think it is pathetic that they still feel the need to track attendance at the college level.

I don't particularly care how they are tracking it, assuming students are aware of that before they start college at those schools. If it isn't stated outright that this is common practice there I'd be ticked as a student or parent though

[scholastica]

21 minutes ago, hjffkj said:

I think it is pathetic that they still feel the need to track attendance at the college level.

I don't particularly care how they are tracking it, assuming students are aware of that before they start college at those schools. If it isn't stated outright that this is common practice there I'd be ticked as a student or parent though

 In defense of the schools, they are now rated and judged on graduation rates and the amount of time it takes to get out of school. It is well known that students who go to class do better and are more likely to graduate and graduate on time. It is in the school’s best interest to find ways to boost student performance. I don’t like this way of doing that,  but I understand the temptation to use systems like this.

[Terabith]

I actually have little beef with the whole "keeping track of who goes to class" issue.  I went to a small liberal arts school; I think my biggest class ever had 25 students, and attendance was taken at pretty much every class.  I know that's less practical in large lecture classes, but quizzes and other ways of incentivizing attendance are certainly doable.  I have a ton of sympathy for the kid in the article who WAS in class, but the app was being glitchy, so he basically lost a bunch of classes not paying attention to what was going on while trying to get his phone/ the app to register him as present.  

But this isn't ultimately about just tracking attendance.  The app is tracking student location all around campus and off campus.  Parents are calling wanting to know if their kid has left campus.  This tracks how often they go to the dining hall, the library, the gym, the student center.  Each student generates THOUSANDS of data points daily about their location and activities, and then students are tracked and compared to different cohorts (full time freshmen, commuter students, minority students, etc) and interventions and penalties are applied based on how much students deviate from the norm.  It's like an episode of "Black Mirror" or the Chinese social contract.  I don't care how much they gamify the app; that's genuine dystopian stuff there.  Possibly more disturbing, from my point of view, however, is that neither of my kids, age 14 and 16, see it as such.  They have spent a lifetime assuming they're being watched every single moment by the government or big data.  They've long since given up any notion of privacy in exchange for convenience.  It doesn't matter that *I* didn't watch them on video baby monitors or track their locations outside of the house on a smartphone; their peers were and so they assume that is normal and expected.  Their schools have video cameras everywhere.  They assume that once they step outside of the house, they are continuously watched.  They assume the school computer tracks their keystrokes and web searches.  They took our talks about digital privacy seriously and believe that google, at the very least, certainly Instagram, and possibly the government watch them online.  

[Clemsondana]

Although I think this is creepy, I will say that recording attendance isn't optional any more at most schools.  Because of federal financial aid rules, instructors have to be able to enter the last day that student attended class if a student fails.  Back when I taught at a CC, it was described as needing to know if it was an 'honest fail' where a student tried but couldn't do the work, or whether it was a financial aid scam where they got their $ and then quit coming.  I had an in-class assessment every week in labs and 9/18 weeks in lectures, so I had a good idea of the last date just based on when they quit turning in work, but that might not make sense in all types of classes.  This is all so different from when I was in school - without online platforms and posted videos or notes, if we didn't come to class we didn't get the info and then we failed.  

[Serenade]

I don't like tracking and requiring attendance.  While they didn't track attendance electronically at my son's CC, attendance was required.  The attendance policy was tight, too -- students could have ONE excused absence per semester, if they requested that absence in advance.  My sons had to use their one excused absence the day I had knee surgery, which was planned for fall break, but then due to a weather emergency, that day of fall break became a class day.  What that meant is that my boys had to go to class on days when they were quite sick, spreading their lovely germs to their classmates, some of whom had given them the germs in the first place.  Mandatory attendance policies encourage students to go to class sick, and I don't think that is a good idea.

Edited December 26, 2019 by Serenade

[Innisfree]

If it's just about tracking attendance, couldn't they limit the system to only collect that information? 

[Innisfree]

This article describes a far more pervasive tracking system. I agree with Serenade that mandatory attendance has its own set of problems, but the system as described is monitoring all sorts of different aspects of student behavior: how often they eat, how often they go to the library, whether they leave campus. As one person said, it would allow individual students' daily patterns of movement to be tracked. That's both Big Brother oversight, and potentially dangerous if a stalker could get access to the information.

[Arcadia]

1 hour ago, Terabith said:

I actually have little beef with the whole "keeping track of who goes to class" issue.  I went to a small liberal arts school; I think my biggest class ever had 25 students, and attendance was taken at pretty much every class.  I know that's less practical in large lecture classes, but quizzes and other ways of incentivizing attendance are certainly doable.. 

Possibly more disturbing, from my point of view, however, is that neither of my kids, age 14 and 16, see it as such.  They have spent a lifetime assuming they're being watched every single moment by the government or big data.  

 

When I use the guest WiFi at any community colleges or colleges, I assume they would data mine the data. 

I started university in 1991. We had to use our student ID card as a security pass by swiping the card at the door for most facilities. So admin staff know when we went into a room unless a schoolmate opened the door for us. I had large lecture classes and for those the lecturer would collect signed class attendance sheets and spot check by calling names off the sheets. 

My kid use his student WiFi when he is in community college campus and he has to log in to the campus WiFi with his student account. Without installing an app, he is already traceable if someone wants to mine the data. 

Edited December 26, 2019 by Arcadia
Typing errors

[Murphy101]

This seems redundant. My daughter goes to a small liberal arts school and they have to swipe their I’d badge for literally everything. It’s their food card, their dorm key, to enter any buildings. When we went on tour, the tour guy had to swipe us in at every building. And many classes he couldn’t swipe us in. Such as the science labs and art studios couldn’t be swiped in unless you were enrolled in that class.

I am sure they are data mining but they were using the swipe badges for tracking long before the WiFi ability. 

Personally I think data mining should be illegal unless what is mined is specific and shared with the person being mined. But that’ll never be how it goes bc those with big pockets will never let that happen. It’s why I don’t think genuine democracy is sustainable. It will be all background program manipulation.

[JustEm]

1 hour ago, scholastica said:

 In defense of the schools, they are now rated and judged on graduation rates and the amount of time it takes to get out of school. It is well known that students who go to class do better and are more likely to graduate and graduate on time. It is in the school’s best interest to find ways to boost student performance. I don’t like this way of doing that,  but I understand the temptation to use systems like this.

Oh I understand why colleges do it, I still think it is pathetic that this is the system people feel need to be put in place for adults.

[Frances]

1 hour ago, Innisfree said:

If it's just about tracking attendance, couldn't they limit the system to only collect that information? 

Many schools with large lectures have been using clickers to track attendance and increase class engagement for quite awhile. This seems to go far beyond that.

[plansrme]

University of Alabama has been tracking students' attendance at home football games to make sure they stay for the entire game.  Instead of scheduling non-conference games their fans actually want to watch (but that might prove a challenge to U of A), they schedule cupcakes and then are irritated that students do not sit in the broiling heat to watch them beat the Citadel by 70 points.  It seems like colleges would be better off encouraging class attendance the same way they should encourage game attendance, i.e., by providing content their customers want to consume.

I am firmly on the "that's creepy" side of this debate.  I don't think I ever had a college or grad school class track attendance, but I went to class anyway because I needed to.

[StephanieZ]

I don't have a problem with tracking attendance using something like the "clickers" that my kids attending big state schools have to use for attendance/quizes/participation points in their large lecture classes.

I DO have a big problem with the insanely invasive in-the-background WiFi/Bluetooth/smartphone tracker apps that are being used to monitor how much time a student spends in their dorm/cafeteria/library/etc. That's really messed up and is a huge invasion of privacy. It is training students to accept Big Brother in a way that's much more Orwellian than parental.

NO WAY do I want to pay a college to train my young adult child to be a compliant cog in that machine. Hell NO. One of the (big) reasons I have homeschooled was to avoid my children being trained to be compliant servants to a "machine." They need to understand how systems/machines/society works, but they should NOT accept loss of individual liberties/privacy for random non-reasons such as this. 

When you choose to give up a freedom for a good reason, that's all well and good. We make those CHOICES all the time. When you just allow them to be stripped away in a systemic way, that certainly isn't voluntary in a meaningful way, that's dangerous and damaging, IMHO.

I want my kids to be independent thinkers and autonomous beings -- clear thinking humans who choose their own path and lead others, too. I do NOT want them trained to be compliant, period. (Yes, that has some drawbacks, but it's a dearly held value.) 

I'm college shopping for Kid#3 starting now, and this article along with some other scary ones I've read recently about this same technology being employed community wide in areas of China have alerted me to what to watch for. I will be asking questions about this stuff on our campus tours, and will strongly discourage Kid#3 from choosing a program that has this sort of background-tracking going on. 

[Farrar]

I don't have a problem with tracking attendance in a general sense. Some classes rely on participation and interaction. You need to show up.

One thing that I really noted is how it moves the burden for doing that from the professor to the student, which I don't really like. Professors should be able to set these policies and enforce them with institutional support themselves. I get that there are specific requirements for athletes and around scholarship monies. Okay. But I'm still just dubious about moving the burden to the student for keeping their own attendance. Especially when apparently the tracking can go awry. The story about the guy trying to make it work was certainly worrying. We all know tech is fussy like that - especially GPS.

And the trade off! Like, the trade off is so terrible.

My first thought reading this was... good grief, I know there are reasons to attend a large uni, but this makes me want my kids at smaller schools. I can't imagine most lac's using this method. I mean, for one thing, they rarely have div I scholarship kids to worry about, so there's no gateway into this tech. But also, just... the big brother mentality.

[Murphy101]

39 minutes ago, Farrar said:

I don't have a problem with tracking attendance in a general sense. Some classes rely on participation and interaction. You need to show up.

One thing that I really noted is how it moves the burden for doing that from the professor to the student, which I don't really like. Professors should be able to set these policies and enforce them with institutional support themselves. I get that there are specific requirements for athletes and around scholarship monies. Okay. But I'm still just dubious about moving the burden to the student for keeping their own attendance. Especially when apparently the tracking can go awry. The story about the guy trying to make it work was certainly worrying. We all know tech is fussy like that - especially GPS.

And the trade off! Like, the trade off is so terrible.

My first thought reading this was... good grief, I know there are reasons to attend a large uni, but this makes me want my kids at smaller schools. I can't imagine most lac's using this method. I mean, for one thing, they rarely have div I scholarship kids to worry about, so there's no gateway into this tech. But also, just... the big brother mentality.

 

Oh I agree completely this is invasive on both personal space and privacy rights.  I don't think they should be able access student phones.  Use the id badge.  But stay the hell off their phones and their computers. And I call BS on the notion that anyone should have to give up those privacy rights in order to get an education or a job.  But obviously the corporate government is not going to ever agree with me.

As for small schools.  Again, the tech has become so cheap and the cost of not having it so high, that even tiny schools have this stuff going on in order to attend.  My daughter goes to a very small state school, so small that when the 80 yr old pipes went kaput she didn't have hot water in her dorm for most of this past semester and had to shower and do laundry and dishes in another dormatory.  It is supposed to be fixed by the end of Christmas break.  I'm mildly sure it will be because the housing dean doesn't want me and two other parents to drive over and sympathicly but politely threaten a lawsuit again. And yet, again, everything is tracked electronic,y there.

A friend has a kid in a small private school out of state of about 5k students and they are the same way.

Something that really pisses me off is everyone is making a ton of money off selling the data of often very low income to modest at best people.  If anyone is going to make money off the data, it seems extra suckage that it's never those who need it the most.

[Farrar]

If you have a smaller school, with smaller classes, then it's not a massive burden for profs to take attendance if it's needed.

If it's a burden, then there are surely better ways. Maybe something you scan in as you enter class.

When I mentioned this to my kids, ds was like, "If you have Android, it's pretty easy to hack it and spoof your location. I'll bet a lot of students just do that." Great.

[TravelingChris]

5 hours ago, hjffkj said:

I think it is pathetic that they still feel the need to track attendance at the college level.

I don't particularly care how they are tracking it, assuming students are aware of that before they start college at those schools. If it isn't stated outright that this is common practice there I'd be ticked as a student or parent though

When I was in a top college of a top university in the early to mid 80's, no one tracked attendance.  You were considered responsible for your education.

[J-rap]

13 minutes ago, TravelingChris said:

When I was in a top college of a top university in the early to mid 80's, no one tracked attendance.  You were considered responsible for your education.

This is how it was for me too, and how I guess I still think college should be...  I mean, those students are adults now.  If they choose to miss class a lot, they might suffer on their projects and exams and class participation, as well as the perks of a teacher-student relationship.  It's up to them.  (But, sometimes class lectures can be a waste of time too, depending on the teacher or the topic...)  What is the teacher or school out if the student doesn't always attend?  They still get the money!

[scholastica]

According to the article, right now about 40 schools are using this app. It is a minuscule number. Now that it’s out there, I doubt it will last long.

[JustEm]

17 minutes ago, TravelingChris said:

When I was in a top college of a top university in the early to mid 80's, no one tracked attendance.  You were considered responsible for your education.

This is how it was when I was in college during the first decade of the 2000's. There were a few professors who chose to take attendance, but most people who were going to skip classes figured out how to get around that.

[Farrar]

Attendance really hurt you when I was a student in the early 90's. But I think this is really dependent on what sort of school you attended and what sort of classes you had. I only had a couple of classes that had more than 15 or so students. It was beyond obvious if you weren't there. Most assignments were structured so that if you missed class, you missed the ability to do a great job on the assignment.

That said, I had one class that took strict attendance and it was not the norm at all. I remember being really surprised. It wasn't at my school though, but at a nearby, but similar school. They locked the doors on us if we showed up even a couple of minutes late, something that happened to me twice when the inter-school bus ran late. I remember my advisor, who had recommended I take the course, was like, wtf when I described it to him the atmosphere. So I guess making you actually show up to class can be done in a way that's infantilizing or in a way that feels constructive.

[TravelingChris]

5 hours ago, Terabith said:

I actually have little beef with the whole "keeping track of who goes to class" issue.  I went to a small liberal arts school; I think my biggest class ever had 25 students, and attendance was taken at pretty much every class.  I know that's less practical in large lecture classes, but quizzes and other ways of incentivizing attendance are certainly doable.  I have a ton of sympathy for the kid in the article who WAS in class, but the app was being glitchy, so he basically lost a bunch of classes not paying attention to what was going on while trying to get his phone/ the app to register him as present.  

But this isn't ultimately about just tracking attendance.  The app is tracking student location all around campus and off campus.  Parents are calling wanting to know if their kid has left campus.  This tracks how often they go to the dining hall, the library, the gym, the student center.  Each student generates THOUSANDS of data points daily about their location and activities, and then students are tracked and compared to different cohorts (full time freshmen, commuter students, minority students, etc) and interventions and penalties are applied based on how much students deviate from the norm.  It's like an episode of "Black Mirror" or the Chinese social contract.  I don't care how much they gamify the app; that's genuine dystopian stuff there.  Possibly more disturbing, from my point of view, however, is that neither of my kids, age 14 and 16, see it as such.  They have spent a lifetime assuming they're being watched every single moment by the government or big data.  They've long since given up any notion of privacy in exchange for convenience.  It doesn't matter that *I* didn't watch them on video baby monitors or track their locations outside of the house on a smartphone; their peers were and so they assume that is normal and expected.  Their schools have video cameras everywhere.  They assume that once they step outside of the house, they are continuously watched.  They assume the school computer tracks their keystrokes and web searches.  They took our talks about digital privacy seriously and believe that google, at the very least, certainly Instagram, and possibly the government watch them online.  

I am kinda that way too and my dh is too but we also are cautious in other ways, though.  We do not use Alexa, etc.  We turn off microphones unless we specificaly want to use those.

[Terabith]

Yup.  I refuse to use Alexa or use Siri, etc.  I tell people it's because I refuse to contribute to the rise of the robot apocalypse.  Spoiler:  I almost certainly am anyway, but I can try.  

[Bluegoat]

I can't see how this wouldn't be an invasion of privacy. And parents wanting to know if their kids went off campus!!!  Creepy.

I don't necessarily have a problem with tracking attendance, it can be important for administrative issues if nothing else. Most of my degree, no one did that, but if you didn't show up you missed all the content, there were no text books. And the professor would notice and not think well of you. 

Quote

It seems like colleges would be better off encouraging class attendance the same way they should encourage game attendance, i.e., by providing content their customers want to consume.

In theory this seems reasonable, but in reality maybe there are a fair number of students who aren't that interested in the work.

[rdj2027]

My son does not have a smart phone, neither does he take a laptop to class.  Now what?  If he attended one of these schools, would he automatically fail because he could not be tracked? Would the school pay for a smart phone?  Can a student only successfully study in the library?  Needless to say, I have a major problem with tracking students like that.  

 

[Laura Corin]

16 hours ago, hjffkj said:

Oh I understand why colleges do it, I still think it is pathetic that this is the system people feel need to be put in place for adults.

As a university administrator, I can definitely understand the temptation to track. We are supposed to treat students as adults and are not allowed to discuss the students with their parents. Yet if something goes wrong and a student is hurt, the university is blamed.

At our university, students sign in to tutorials, absence without good reason can lead to failure in a module, and warnings are sent that include welfare information. If a student fails to attend any tutorials, as soon as I am aware I contact Student Services to set up a welfare check.

[PeachyDoodle]

16 hours ago, Farrar said:

Attendance really hurt you when I was a student in the early 90's. But I think this is really dependent on what sort of school you attended and what sort of classes you had. I only had a couple of classes that had more than 15 or so students. It was beyond obvious if you weren't there. Most assignments were structured so that if you missed class, you missed the ability to do a great job on the assignment.

This was my experience as well. I can distinctly remember one professor who called my dorm room to check on me when I missed class because I was sick!

I hate that as a society we generally have replaced warm, caring, human interactions such as that with metadata and numerical analysis. I realize that it's not possible to have that kind of atmosphere in a classroom with hundreds of students, but I think overall we'd all be better off looking for ways to foster real human community rather than continuing to charge full-steam ahead into technological "solutions" that turn human beings into metrics. 

Wishful thinking, I know. This is another reason I am glad that dd is leaning toward a tiny college that accepts zero federal funding and is exempt from some of the reporting that goes along with that. But there is no way to escape it altogether. Companies have been doing this kind of thing to workers (and governments as well -- especially to teachers) for years. In the early 2000's dh's employer installed GPS on all its company vehicles. He hasn't had a job since then (and he's had many) that allowed him to make decisions using his experienced, although flawed, reason and judgment. Everything has to be measured by numbers and charts and graphs and benchmarks. IMO, the monitoring we see here is just a continuation of this line of thinking. The technology is almost incidental, except that it has made tracking all these things infinitely easier.

[Tree Frog]

20 hours ago, TravelingChris said:

When I was in a top college of a top university in the early to mid 80's, no one tracked attendance.  You were considered responsible for your education.

Among many other concerns, this one jumped out at me. I had to figure out life while I was in college. These college students are not being trained to handle things for themselves. They're being trained to allow manipulation. When they leave the university and have no outside motivation to get to the job on time or do a good job at work, what will happen? IOW, is this another step to prevent students from being responsible for themselves until after college instead of learning how to handle life's independence during college?

[Frances]

38 minutes ago, wilrunner said:

Among many other concerns, this one jumped out at me. I had to figure out life while I was in college. These college students are not being trained to handle things for themselves. They're being trained to allow manipulation. When they leave the university and have no outside motivation to get to the job on time or do a good job at work, what will happen? IOW, is this another step to prevent students from being responsible for themselves until after college instead of learning how to handle life's independence during college?

While I strongly dislike the tracking, I’m guessing that for most people keeping a job and having money to live and spend and save are motivations to get to work on time and do a good job.

[Lanny]

The thread title mentions WiFi, but the quote says it was with Bluetooth.  

I never use Bluetooth, but, occasionally, I notice that by accident, somehow, probably because I had the phone in my pocket and bumped against something, it got turned on.  If I see that, immediately, I disable Bluetooth.  (My phone is Android 7.0)

Bluetooth is really dangerous, if one is not aware that it is on and  is not using it intentionally.

 

[Tree Frog]

4 hours ago, Frances said:

While I strongly dislike the tracking, I’m guessing that for most people keeping a job and having money to live and spend and save are motivations to get to work on time and do a good job.

I agree that would be the motivation, but the transition between (supervised) college to (unsupervised) work could be more difficult. 

[Teaching3bears]

If they are tracked in college they will continue to be tracked when they graduate: restaurant attendance, food purchases, other purchases, gym attendance.  This info can then be sent to insurance companies.

really?  I find tracking students creepy and only a sign of worse things to come.