Through the activities of the House and Senate Conferees on Tuesday of this week, language that would require distance education universities to implement monitoring systems that may jeopardize the privacy of their students was removed.  The Conference Report states:

“The Conferees adopt the provision as proposed by both the Senate and the House.  The Conferees expect institutions that offer distance education to have security mechanisms in place, such as identification numbers or other pass code information required to be used each time the student participates in class time or coursework on-line.  As new identification technologies are developed and become more sophisticated, less expensive and more mainstream, the Conferees anticipate that accrediting agencies or associations and institutions will consider their use in the future.  The Conferees do not intend that institutions use or rely on any technology that interferes with the privacy of the student and expect that students’ privacy will be protected with whichever method the institutions choose to utilize.”

Please see my post titled, “New Language in Higher Education Act Legislation” for more information on the Higher Education Act.

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s July 25th issue references language in the HEA reauthorization bill that “could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students’ homes.”  The article profiles a few technologies that institutions are piloting to confirm that the student taking the exam/quiz is the individual who registered for the course.  Some of these technologies can invade the individuals’ privacy, even collecting fingerprints.

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Michael Rabjohns sent me a note informing me of an article in the July Harvard Business Review written by Anita Elberse.  Elberse is an associate professor of business administration in the marketing department at Harvard Business School.  Her article leads off with a portrayal of Grand Central Publishing, a company that lists 275-300 books each year in its catalog and identifies two (my emphasis) for which it will pull out all the stops in marketing.  Grand Central pursues a blockbuster strategy for which Elberse gives credit to economists Robert Frank and Phillip Cook (an economist at my alma mater, Duke University) for endorsing in their 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society. 

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