5.2.1.2: Algorithms and Higher Education
- Page ID
- 139193
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How prepared are students for navigating a world of technologies that are fundamentally changing how we encounter, evaluate, and create information? Though they have grown up with internet giants such as Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, are students aware of these systems’ scale, scope, and velocity as their algorithms attempt to predict and influence behavior?
What role do these platforms play in their learning as students seek information they need for school and find their way through a thicket of daily news? What does “algorithmic justice” mean to a new generation of students affected by these systems but perhaps unaware that they are at work — even in their daily interactions with campus learning management systems, such as Canvas, online textbooks and advising and retention software?44
Information literacy and critical thinking, dual competencies promoted on college and university campuses for decades, may come closest to addressing these weighty questions. The way these essential skills are taught, however, tends to concentrate on helping students meet their immediate academic needs: how to read texts closely and critically and how to use the web and library resources to find supporting materials for their assignments.
Drawing on 10 years of PIL studies of college students’ research experiences and habits, we next identify the gaps in students’ learning process and describe the skills and knowledge they will need to navigate information in the age of algorithms.
References
- Canvas, the market leader in learning platforms for digitally delivering readings, assignments, tests, and interaction between students and their instructors, announced its sale in December 2019 to a private equity firm for $2 billion. In March 2019 Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company used on many campuses, was sold to a media conglomerate for $1.75 billion. Quantifying students’ lives to improve student retention is also a growing movement. See Marc Parry (18 July 2018), “Colleges awakening to the opportunities of big data,” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/ education/edlife/colleges-awakening-to-the-opportunities-of-datamining.html