State governments serve an important quality assurance role by certifying that postsecondary institutions are legitimate entities with the capacity to offer valid credentials to students. In recent years, precipitous and high-profile campus closures, predatory and manipulative student recruitment tactics, rising student loan debt burdens, and…

Engaging students and developing interest can be challenging--and not always successful on the first couple of tries. With the help of Elon University's Information Technology team, the Office of the Registrar created a technology solution to give faculty more data about the students registered for their classes in the upcoming term. Using…

We study how colleges shape their students' voting habits by linking millions of SAT takers to their college-enrollment and voting histories. To begin, we show that the fraction of students from a particular college who vote varies systematically by the college's attributes (e.g. increasing with selectivity) but also that seemingly similar…

The Enterprise Learner Record Repository (ELRR) Prototype report details the project design and development activities associated with building the prototype ELRR capability. The ELRR capability is designed to be a a repository composed of local learner profiles that contain data from a diverse set of records, and can be used to follow a service…

Technology integration and learning analytics offer insights to improve educational experiences and outcomes. In advancing these efforts, laws and policies govern these environments placing protections, standards, and developmental opportunities for higher education, students, faculty, and even the nation-state. Nonetheless, evidence of…

This brief discusses the effects of domestic violence on children and their education, the connection between domestic violence and homelessness, and federal legislative responses that help ensure that children affected by domestic violence and homelessness have stable and safe school experiences. It discusses helpful policies and practices for…

The surveillance and securitization of schools has transformed over the last decade to include predictive analytics and algorithms. In Florida, for example, the Pasco Sheriff's Office used school record data sets to identify and monitor youth they believed were "destined for a life of crime." Yet the extent of big data policing as a…

As institutions of higher education increasingly look to data as evidence to support planning, allocate resources, and inform teaching and pedagogy, ethical considerations regarding learning analytics have evolved from being on the margins to more central in the conversations surrounding institutional uses of student data. After outlining this…

Studies indicate that racial disparities in STEM achievement or equity grade gaps are associated with faculty fixed mindset beliefs; however, whether specific instructional beliefs are linked to student academic achievement remains unclear. We surveyed 216 STEM faculty to assess their mindset and instructional beliefs and linked these to detailed…

Education is increasingly taking place in learning environments mediated by technology. This transition has made it easier to collect student-generated data including comments in discussion forums and chats. Although this data is extremely valuable to researchers, it often contains sensitive information like names, locations, social media links,…

The Department of Education's Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) prepared this document to assist school officials working with public health officials in managing public health issues related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), while protecting the privacy of students' education records. Understanding the Family Educational Rights and…

Learning analytics have the potential to improve teaching and learning in K-12 education, but as student data is increasingly being collected and transferred for the purpose of analysis, it is important to take measures that will protect student privacy. A common approach to achieve this goal is the de-identification of the data, meaning the…

The Enterprise Learner Record Repository (ELRR) is one of three Enterprise Digital Learning Modernization (EDLM) lines of effort supported by the ADL Initiative. Today, learner records for Department of Defense (DoD) personnel are stored in disparate locations, along with inconsistent data formats, which complicates the transport, management, and…

The scope of the ELRR Prototype Systems Integration Plan (SIP) is to provide technical guidance for integrating ELRR Prototype with ADL TLA sandbox components, such as the Authoritative Learner Record Store (LRS), Competency and Skills System (CaSS), and Enterprise Course Catalog (ECC), along with a recommended resource mixture to conduct the…

Paper certificates are difficult to carry, easy to lose, easy to forge and with other security issues, which were not solved until the emergence of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology uses one-way hash functions, asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, consensus mechanisms and smart contracts to achieve decentralization, non-tampering…