The influences of surveillance capitalism on online learning?

Introduction:

    “Online learning means the intervening agency of communication technologies has allowed instruction in higher education to happen across time and space without the physical co-presence of the instructor and students” (Major, 2015). With the innovation of technologies, the feasibility and flexibility of taking online courses are increasing. According to Major’s research, there were 7.1 million students who took online courses in more than 2800 institutions of higher education by 2013. Generally, it is good to see online learning benefits everyone who has the demand for that, but it may derive unexpected problems. In this digital era, using networks allows us satisfying daily needs, because the internet can store our personal information for various purposes. Meanwhile, it also means everything in the internet is only a piece of data, but it is not that safe as people think. Personal information can be easily stolen by others. Merchants may sell their products to consumers more efficient based on tracking users’ purchase patterns. From online learning perspective, some people may intentionally steal other’s intellectual properties. In this case, some well-known plagiarism detect tools, like Turnitin, we have no idea whether they are only just detecting if the paper is plagiarised. Our information and privacy are easily exposed to others; therefore, it is significant to protect our information.

Literature Review:

    “The term ‘big data’ refers to the binding of advanced predictive tools with large data sets on human activity, with the aim of tracking, monitoring, analyzing, and disseminating this information(Boyd and Crawford 2012; Lohr 2012; Warner and Sloan 2014).” Basically, we barely have privacy, because no matter we want to expose our information or not, other people may be able to figure out our records. Hence, Zuboff claims that  surveillance capitalism is a new economic order that states human experience as free materials for hidden commercial practices of behavioural modification (Zuboff, 2019). There is a strong interrelationship between surveillance capitalism and privacy. Surveillance is considered a profitable business model which generates profit by predicting user’s behaviour and selling their information. 

    “Turnitin is a web-based plagiarism software program used in 126 countries by over 875,000 educators and millions of students” (Vanacker, 2011). The purpose of this software is to detect if and to what extent the text in the student’s paper matches any of the sources in the database and generate a report to the instructors. In some institutions, instructors are allowed to ask students to upload their works to Turnitin and generate a similarity report. First of all, it is not an ethical way to judge student’s work. It is unfair to students to only put their work in the software instead of judging it by instructor’s understanding. Besides, Turnitin actively profits from the work of students are about $752 million (Morris & Stommel, 2018). It is not only an ethical issue, but also a problem that this kind of platform is making profit from student’s intellectual properties.