Masks: Designing for Privacy in Education

Masks is an examination of how privacy and identity impact education. Identity design features can give users better control of their privacy, but must embrace several trade-offs: free speech versus accountability, supporting differences while preserving simplicity, and providing transparency while maintaining usability. A poorly designed identity system could discourage participation and violate privacy expectations. This is especially true in online learning systems, where students are encouraged to post publicly and engage with others in a form that may be persistently available and outside their control. We will work with the groundbreaking Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) to explore how online students want to disclose information, how information disclosure control currently works, and how we might build more robust systems that enable learners and educators to use "masks" of nuanced identity to support individual privacy and the communal learning experience online.