In recent decades, higher education institutions around the world have come to depend on complex digital infrastructures. In addition to registration, financial, and other operations platforms, digital classroom tools with built-in learning analytics capacities underpin many course delivery options. Taken together, these intersecting digital systems collect vast amounts of data from students, staff, and faculty. Educators’ work environments—and knowledge about their work environments—have been shifted by this rise in pervasive datafication. In this paper, we overview the ways faculty in a variety of institutional status positions and geographic locales understand this shift and make sense of the datafied infrastructures of their institutions. We present findings from a comparative case study (CCS) of university educators in six countries, examining participants’ knowledge, practices, experiences, and perspectives in relation to datafication, while tracing patterns across contexts. We draw on individual, systemic, and historical axes of comparison to demonstrate that in spite of structural barriers to educator data literacy, professionals teaching in higher education do have strong and informed ethical and pedagogical perspectives on datafication that warrant greater attention. Our study suggests a distinction between the understandings educators have of data processes, or technical specifics of datafication on campuses, and their understanding of big picture data paradigms and ethical implications. Educators were found to be far more knowledgeable and comfortable in paradigm discussions than they were in process ones, partly due to structural barriers that limit their involvement at the process level.

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中文翻译：

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障碍和信念：大学教育工作者如何理解高等教育系统数据化的比较案例研究

近几十年来，世界各地的高等教育机构开始依赖复杂的数字基础设施。除了注册、财务和其他运营平台外，具有内置学习分析功能的数字课堂工具也是许多课程交付选项的基础。总而言之，这些交叉的数字系统从学生、教职员工和教师那里收集了大量数据。教育工作者的工作环境——以及关于他们工作环境的知识——已经随着无处不在的数据化的兴起而改变。在本文中，我们概述了各种机构地位和地理区域的教师如何理解这种转变并理解其机构的数据化基础设施。我们展示了来自六个国家大学教育工作者的比较案例研究 (CCS) 的发现，检查参与者与数据化相关的知识、实践、经验和观点，同时追踪跨上下文的模式。我们利用个人、系统和历史的比较轴来证明，尽管教育者的数据素养存在结构性障碍，但高等教育中的专业教学人员确实对数据化具有强大而明智的伦理和教学观点，值得更多关注。我们的研究表明，教育工作者对数据处理或校园数据化技术细节的理解与他们对大数据范式和伦理含义的理解之间存在差异。发现教育工作者在范式讨论中比在过程讨论中更有知识和更自在，

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