The proliferation of learning analytics (LA) in higher education has relied on data from learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas and Blackboard. Despite widespread LMS usage, students often lack clarity on what specific data is collected and who has access to it. This study explores undergraduate students’ understanding of data collection practices within the Canvas LMS. We analyzed survey responses of nearly 600 students, examining students’ awareness of the various roles within Canvas and their corresponding data permissions. The results reveal that students exhibit a general awareness of data collection practices but are unsure about the extent of their data’s use and misinterpret the use of data analytics, highlighting a a greater need for critical data education in universities and other educational contexts. These findings suggest a critical need for universities to enhance transparency and educate students on data privacy and LMS functionalities.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories. Findings: Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.

Online curricular marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) are challenging conventional notions of curriculum, the professionalization of educators, and the exchange of capital in P-12 education. In this research note, we explore these issues by presenting an accounting of: (a) the size and scope of TPT, (b) the number of TPT resources being downloaded, and (c) the financial transactions associated with TPT educator-storefronts. Findings indicated that TPT hosted 4,018,173 classroom resources from 208,748 educator-sellers with 1.5 billion all-time downloads and $3.9 billion in total sales. 69% of all TPT downloads were of free materials. However, an overwhelming 81% of total TPT sales were attributed to the top 1% of educator-sellers (n = 1,524). TPT’s massive scope suggests it has introduced an important disruption in P-12 curriculum, with implications for the professionalization of educators. Furthermore, TPT’s unequal distribution of wealth across educator-sellers suggests disparities in the extent to which individual sellers are part of this disruption.

Although board, card, and other analog games can serve as useful educational technologies, little research exists to support teachers’ efforts in finding analog games that are pedagogically appropriate or likely to be well-received by their students. In this study, the authors retrieved data associated with 208 educational games from the crowdsourced website BoardGameGeek. They used this data to summarize players’ description of games into 15 themes, mechanics, and genres that can support teachers’ comparison and evaluation of analog educational games. They then analyzed how these design features influenced player reception of these games—as evidenced by game ratings on BoardGameGeek. To do this, they used two models: a hierarchical regression (features were nested within themes, mechanics, and genres categories) and a flat stepwise regression (features were all at the same level). Both analyses indicated that themes were parsimonious and significant predictors of game ratings, suggesting that the theme of an educational game may be an important consideration for teachers. The findings of this paper present helpful initial guidelines for teachers, teacher educators, and others interested in educational analog games; however, holistic evaluation of analog games and thorough consideration of their pedagogical potential are important.

Background. Player-generated reviews of video games represent a large, rich, and under-explored source of data for exploring what makes for an effective game. Aim. We explore whether existing theory, in the form of a comprehensive gaming taxonomy, suitably captures the issues that players raise when they review games. Method. User-submitted game reviews were coded along the dimensions of the comprehensive gaming taxonomy to test the frequency of usage of each dimension. Results. We found some support for the use of the taxonomy, as four of nine taxonomy features were frequently present in game reviews. We also found support for other features of reviews not encapsulated by the Bedwell et al. (2012) taxonomy. Specifically, we found that players often reviewed video games: a) holistically; b) by comparing them to other games, game franchises, and other reviews; and c) by judging the value of games in terms of time, money, and effort. These results have implications for using game reviews for future research.