Again, this is probably a more felicitous wording than “privacy protection”. Sure, it takes as a given that some use of data is desirable. And the preceding section makes it sound like Learning Analytics advocates mostly need ammun… arguments to push their agenda. Still, the notion that we want to advocate for responsible use is more likely to find common ground than this notion that there’s a “data faucet” that should be switched on or off depending on certain stakeholders’ needs. After all, there exists a set of data use practices which are either uncontroversial or, at least, accepted as “par for the course” (no pun intended). For instance, we probably all assume that a registrar should receive the grade data needed to grant degrees and we understand that such data would come from other sources (say, a learning management system or a student information system).

Not necessarily, if PDF is in the mix, it can be the medium for annotations that might later anchor to a website -- even if PDFs are distributed to participants and used locally as mentioned above.