By: Joanne Ferrone, West Associate Editor
As the saying goes, “Big Brother is watching you,” and he just arrived at a Tri-C campus near you.
Since every student has an identification card, we can already expect certain personal information is available to faculty and staff members located within their respective departments at Tri-C. Hopefully, our financial information is only privy to staff members in the Financial Aid Department.
Tri-C hired a local software company to create the “Ultimate Student Spyware Program” (USSP). Yet again, tuition dollars being put to good use – that was a joke people. In any event, the name of USSP is really “OneRecord,” and Tri-C began using the program over the summer.
Instead of tracking a student’s financial aid, personal background, academic performance and other miscellaneous information, OneRecord is able to track 100 points of data for each student. Dear Big Brother: Don’t you think 100 points of data per student is overkill?
OneRecord is a single interface program and users see one’s data because it’s available via the same data pool. According to an article appearing in Crain’s Cleveland Business, the software’s goal is “to make the college experience as seamless as possible for students, increasing graduation rates while decreasing the time it takes to earn a degree,” and “it gives all of its faculty and staff access to all of the information the college has collected about students in one place.”
Does this a mean work-study student can see a student’s personal data? While I understand why a professor might need to view certain information regarding one of their students, is it really necessary for him/her to see every piece of information? The article fails to mention: why this amount of data per student is needed to help Tri-C accomplish their goals, and what happens to the data after a student graduates.
Let’s just hope OneRecord will live up to its expectations, and nobody’s information doesn’t end up in the wrong hands by someone at Tri-C.
- Tags: data mining, Fall 2016, Issue 4, PII, spying
