Education International
education is changed forever. We founded Class for Zoom to help’, reads its website invitation for educators to participate in beta tests.137 The emergence of an industry of tracing apps for a ‘COVID-safe’ campus have also raised privacy concerns. These apps typically track students’ movements at all times, and often include a tool to self-report any illness or cold/flu like symptoms. In the case of BioIntelliSense, they offer a ‘BioButton’ add on, which is a ‘discreet’, ‘FDA-cleared medical-grade wearable’ that continuously monitors for COVID-19 symptoms, The BioButton™ wearable medical-grade monitoring and BioMobile™ daily screening surveys establish COVID-19 risk status with ‘Cleared’ and ‘Not Cleared’ notifications before leaving for work or school. BioButton’s continuous temperature and vital signs monitoring, combined with advanced analytics, enables the BioButton to identify statistically meaningful trends and screen for early potential COVID-19 infection.138
One account of students returning to campus at Albion College in the US detailed that students must download the ‘Aura’ COVID-tracing app before they can participate in campus-based activities. Moreover, students are only free to move around a campus ‘safe zone’ and if they leave this area, university administrators are notified by the app. This means that students working off-campus need approval to do so, and have been denied if the exposure risk is deemed too high.139 These type of technologies introduce bio-surveillance and epidemiological monitoring on to campuses, thereby raising critical issues related to data security, privacy and ethics, as well as the risk that health data might be repurposed or monetised in the ‘after-life’ of the pandemic.140
11. AI transformations Across many of the categories covered in the sections above there is an evident focus on the enhanced deployment of data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence in higher education. This is reflected in the language of personalised learning and data-driven decision-making, which has been central to the edtech industry’s expansion over the past decade, and in the growing market of edtech providers promoting AIbased products (Renz and Hilbig 2020). Just prior to the onset of the 137 ClassEdu Class for Zoom: https://www.classedu.com/ 138 BioIntelliSense. New! Bio Button COVID-19 Screening Solution: https://biointellisense.com/biobutton 139 Marowski, S. 2020, 21 August. Coronavirus app doesn’t track students’ locations all the time, Albion College president says. Mlive: https://www.mlive.com/news/2020/08/coronavirus-app-doesnt-track-students-locations-all-the-time-albion-collegepresident-says.html 140 Roberts, S.L. 2020, 20 April. Tracking Covid-19 using big data and big tech: a digital Pandora’s Box. LSE Politics and Policy: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/tracking-covid-19/
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