Personal, Institutional, and Societal Barriers to Educators’ Engagement with Datafication on Campus

A Case Study

Abstract

Datafied digital systems have permeated higher education over the past decade. Registration, grading, financial operations, alumni communications, and often teaching take place through digital platforms that extract and collate data, about students as well as faculty and staff. At the level of these data system processes, academics may not have the knowledge or practices to fully grasp the shift in their workplace that datafication represents. However, our research suggests that educators do understand the paradigm shift that datafication represents and have strong beliefs about how institutions should proceed to protect students and academia itself. Our team conducted an in-depth Comparative Case Study (CCS) investigation of how university educators make sense of the datafied infrastructures in and on which they work. This presentation overviews the knowledge, practices, experiences, and perspectives of educators in various institutional status positions from six different countries, in relation to datafied digital tools. We will focus particularly on the barriers that participants articulated to their own engagement with data, at personal, institutional, and societal levels. We will frame ways barriers are reinforced by institutional approaches to datafication, overview participants’ concerns, and explore how datafication has altered faculty’s power position as knowers within the academy.