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Nitin Nambiar
Independent Researcher
Karnataka, India
Abstract
The expansion of online education over the past decade—and its exponential growth during global crises such as the COVID‑19 pandemic—has necessitated robust mechanisms to uphold academic integrity and ensure learner accountability. Institutions have increasingly turned to digital surveillance tools, including live video monitoring, automated activity logging, keystroke pattern analysis, and AI‑driven proctoring platforms. While these technologies promise to deter misconduct and verify learner identity, their deployment raises profound ethical questions. Central among these are concerns over privacy infringement, algorithmic bias, psychological stress, and the potential exacerbation of existing inequities among student populations. This delves into each dimension, synthesizing theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to articulate the nuanced trade‑offs involved. Drawing upon Foucault’s panopticon metaphor, we explore how perpetual visibility can transform learners’ self‑regulation, potentially stifling creativity, authentic participation, and academic risk‑taking. We examine privacy theory to highlight the tension between an institution’s duty to ensure fair assessment and a student’s right to informational self‑determination. Furthermore, we investigate how surveillance can erode trust in the educator‑learner relationship, reshaping pedagogy from collaborative inquiry into adversarial oversight. Equity analyses reveal that learners in shared or resource‑limited environments suffer disproportionate technical and psychological burdens, amplifying the digital divide. Through a mixed‑methods study involving 150 instructors and 200 students across multiple continents, our findings confirm that, despite instructors’ strong belief in surveillance as an integrity safeguard, students overwhelmingly report anxiety, self‑censorship, and feelings of violation.
Keywords
Online Surveillance, Ethics, Privacy, Academic Integrity, Student Autonomy
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