Staff’s perception of students’ informational privacy in higher education: The case of Canvas

Abstract: This study aims at discussing how students’ informational privacy in the learning management system (LMS) Canvas is perceived by staff at higher education institutions (HEIs), as well as identifying challenges arising from dataveillance and from perceptions of informational privacy themselves. The study of perceptions is based on a range of interviews at five HEIs in Sweden. While the LMS Canvas includes dataveillance of students especially through learning analytics (LA) functions that are novel and opaque at Swedish HEIs, consideration of respective flows of personal information and resulting challenges to students’ informational privacy is relatively scarce. Even though usage of dataveillance capabilities appears limited at HEIs, a discrepancy between processed data and respective perceptions among staff, in addition to rare institutional discussions, make Canvas a problematic case for HEIs. Canvas and its introduction were generally perceived as a success, but dataveillance is likely unknown to many students and thus potentially misaligned with their interests for informational privacy.