University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Conflicting Values: An Exploration of the Tensions between Learning Analytics and Academic Librarianship

Oliphant, Tami; Brundin, Michael R.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/105994

Description

Title
Conflicting Values: An Exploration of the Tensions between Learning Analytics and Academic Librarianship
Author(s)
  • Oliphant, Tami
  • Brundin, Michael R.
Issue Date
2019
Keyword(s)
  • Learning analytics
  • Libraries
  • Academic Libraries
  • Academic librarianship
Abstract
The prevailing rhetoric concerning learning analytics is that its use will support the educational endeavor and make significant improvements to teaching and learning. For academic libraries, learning analytics presents the possibility of using library data to coordinate, integrate, and align with the goals of the institutions in which they are embedded. While libraries have a long history of collecting data to support various service and learning objectives, those data have typically been siloed, de-identified, private, and confidential. Although there are positive contributions that learning analytics can make to the learning process, there are concerns associated with its use, particularly the tensions between the objectives of learning analytics contrasted with different conceptualizations of learners and the values of education and librarianship. Institutions of higher education use learning analytics to achieve institutionally defined goals and outcomes for students, which creates tensions with the enshrined values of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics, Library Bill of Rights, and Core Competencies of Librarianship. The transcendent benefits to society that are inherent in education and academic librarianship, such as the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, are not measurable through learning analytics.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Series/Report Name or Number
Library Trends 68 (1). Summer 2019
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105994
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2019.0028
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 68 (1) Summer 2019: Learning Analytics and the Academic Library: Critical Questions about Real and Possible Futures PRIMARY
Library Trends 68 (1) Summer 2019: Learning Analytics and the Academic Library: Critical Questions about Real and Possible Futures. Edited by Kyle M. L. Jones.