This SPEC Kit examines current practices, policies, and ethical issues around libraries and learning analytics. It explore how ARL member institutions are navigating the balance between gathering and managing data in support of learning analytics initiatives and attending to the profession’s ethics commitments. To these ends, it seeks to answer these broad questions: how are academic libraries planning for, adopting, and participating in learning analytics initiatives?; what mechanisms do they use to maintain data security and privacy?; what ethical issues do they encounter when participating in learning analytics?; and how do they negotiate and resolve those issues? It includes examples of library privacy statements and policies, institutional privacy polices, and data security policies.

Perry, Michael R., Kristin A. Briney, Abigail Goben, Andrew Asher, Kyle M. L. Jones, M. Brooke Robertshaw, and Dorothea Salo. Learning Analytics. SPEC Kit 360. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, September 2018.