Ideal Learner Profile Data

Personal data collected from learners needs to be conducted with a specific cause that can be easily articulated to users in order to be compliant with growing data privacy standards such as GDPR. Most user data falls under a few loose types/purposes:

In addition, this data requires different levels of access and protection to remain secured:

• Admin-only: Full access, not visible to course staff, but visible to platform-level staff, such as support staff and site administrators

  • Could potentially be expanded/differentiated for learning program managers

• Course staff-only: Access given to users who have course staff-level access to a course where the learner is enrolled

• Connected learner-only: Access given only to other learners who share a connection, such as a course or organisation link (such as being part of the same school or company)

• Learner-only: Access given to all authenticated users

• Public: Visible to all who access the page, regardless of authentication status or role

The ideal learner profiles would allow the following types of information to be captured from learners by default:

Most importantly, however, the ideal learner profile would allow a site administrator to customise which of the non-essential fields are mandatory, optional or hidden, as well as providing the ability to add custom data fields to user accounts as dropdown options or free-text. The data should be gatherable via user account settings, or at the point of registration.

Where allowed by administrators, learners should also be able to control the visibility of their public profiles, such as switching their bio from being public to all viewers to only visible to learners who share a connection, or hiding aspects of their name from other learners. This should be configurable between options, for example allowing learners to display their interests publicly, or to other learners, without being able to remove viewing permissions from staff.

As these settings are typically tied heavily to the platform’s context (such as not allowing K-12 learners to share their data publicly, compared to a MOOC platform where the assumed access level is higher), it would make considerable sense for all these settings to include some form of preset starting point for specific known use cases.

Also crucially, some demographic and personality data such as gender identity and pronouns are extremely sensitive in nature, and should be handled with sensitivity built into the system’s design. The ideal way to handle this is simply by providing a free-text entry field rather than selecting from a list of options. Some good research on the collection and handling of this type of sensitive data can be found in the following articles:

• Good Practices: Demographic Data Collection | LGBTQ+ Equity Center

• Collecting and processing data on gender identity, England and Wales: Census 2021 - Office for National Statistics  

• MRS Best Practice Guide on Collecting Data on Sex and Gender

• MRS Best Practice Guide on Research Participant Vulnerability  

Which data a learner’s profile page displays is essentially dependent on the context, with member of course staff needing different information to a fellow learner who is viewing a user’s profile to get to know them better, or a training manager viewing a learner’s profile to review their progress across the courses purchased for a member of staff. This means that the data visible on a user’s profile page needs to be contextualised to either the viewer’s role, or the page context in which the learner profile data is displayed.

This may make it necessary to have multiple versions of profile pages depending on context, at the very least an overall site profile vs. an in-course learner profile, potentially more depending on the desired user experience, but these should all draw from the same centralised user profile data.