University using students’ phones to track if they are in class
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — University of Missouri students, be warned: If it’s not Big Brother watching you, it might be your professors and university administrators.
The school is using hidden technology and an app on student cellphones to keep track of who is in class and who is not.
Officials say it’s for the students’ own good. Besides, they say, MU’s athletic department has been using the tracking app the past four years for all freshmen athletes, plus any athlete in academic trouble.
Now, as a test pilot, the school is expanding the program to any student new to campus for this semester, which starts Tuesday. Faculty volunteered to have their classes be part of the test. Their students won’t be given a choice.
“A student will have to participate in the recording of attendance,” said Jim Spain, vice provost for undergraduate studies at MU. Every student involved will be told ahead of time that attendance is being monitored. University officials, Spain said, will even work with students who don’t have a phone to make sure they can participate.
But critics worry that the monitoring could go way beyond a professor’s old-school attendance records and is the first step down a path to invasion of student privacy.
The phone app is called Spotter, developed by a former Mizzou basketball coach. It works using short-range phone sensors and campus-wide WiFi networks. The university can tell when a student crosses a classroom threshold to enter or leave as the cellphone pings off of a beacon stashed in the room. The app notifies students that they are not in class, in case they are there and forgot to turn on their Bluetooth setting.
“It’s the way of leveraging technology to provide us with timely information,” said Spain.
“It’s also an effort to help students improve their academic performance. “It has been proven that class attendance and student success are linked.”
Research does back that up. The University of Texas at San Antonio found back in 2005 “that attendance significantly influences test score averages for students across sections and institutions.”
No other major university in the Kansas City region is using this app, but MU joins dozens of schools across the nation using similar technology to monitor thousands of students’ academic performance along with their comings and goings.
“We have deep privacy concerns about this,” said Sara Baker, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri. She said that such tracking applications have the ACLU questioning “what sort of privacy rights students might be giving up to attend public universities.”
While Baker admits she has not completely researched how MU is using the technology, she said “any time you use surveillance technology, the question always is who is watching the watcher.” She said there is always room for abuse. “Like monitoring which students are participating in protests,” Baker said. Are students being tracked wherever they go on campus? And she worries about who might gain access to that information.
University officials argue that Spotter does not track students’ every move but rather keeps track of their attendance, something professors have routinely done with sign-up sheets they passed around or, more recently, requiring students to enter a daily code in the computer to prove they were in class.
“We’re adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” Virginia Commonwealth University sophomore Robby Pfeifer told The Washington Post recently. Commonwealth recently began logging the attendance of its students through the campus WiFi network. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? ... And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re micromanaged every second of the day?”
Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University are among others using Spotter.
On Spotter’s website, Syracuse University professor Jeffrey Rubin says the app “provided immense benefit” to his class and allowed him to reach out to students who were missing class. “Since using Spotter, attendance has gone way up in class, and students who were at risk, by not attending class, are able to turn their semester around.”
Rubin is also the founder of Sidearm Sports, which automates and distributes athletic stats for universities.
Micah Linthacum, a freshman forward on the MU women’s basketball team, takes it in stride. Athletes are used to this sort of thing.
“I know that we have certain academic people that will go around to random classes around campus in person to check in if you’re there. Obviously you can’t do that with hundreds of athletes,” said Linthacum, who is from Jefferson City.