Student transparency in Insights: data collected to support you

What data is collected from me and where does it go?

• As a student whose organization uses Microsoft Teams for Education, data about your digital participation may be collected to help educators understand student habits and initiate support if needed.

Education Insights in Microsoft Teams, the tool educators use to observe digital engagement, collects information about students and provides visualizations of that data. Information collected includes:

Teams component	Data collected
Assignments	Opening, turning in, and grade on assignments.
Channel engagement	Visiting a channel, creating a post, replying to and liking a post (not including chat content).
Files	Uploading, downloading, accessing, modifying, commenting on, and sharing a file (not including file content).
OneNote Class Notebook	Editing a page or section in a notebook (not including page content).
Meetings	Attendance (not including meeting content).
Reading Progress	Accuracy rate, most challenging words, words per minute, and expression data.
Reflect	Check-in responses.
Search Progress	Student searches.

• With data and visuals to help understand student needs, educators can quickly identify individual students’ digital participation patterns, so they can support them more personally.  If students aren’t engaged in digital learning on Teams, or if there is a change in student’s activity levels, educators can take notice and adapt their teaching.

• Insights reports are only available to designated educators and school leaders, and only include student learning activities within Microsoft Teams.

• As a student, you can see all data collected about you by visiting this page and logging in with your school account.

• In the report, select any class to see the latest trends calculated about your digital activity and the data collected about you in the past year. As mentioned above, only you, your educators and school leaders can see it. Other students don’t have access to this information.

What about privacy?

• It’s good to keep an eye on your digital data and identity. Digital activity is always susceptible to phishing, viruses, and data breaches. To protect student and educator privacy while collecting data that can improve learning outcomes, Education Insights, as part of Microsoft 365, meets national, regional, and industry-specific regulations for data collection and use, including GDPR and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), that protect the privacy of your education records.

What if the data is wrong?

• As with any technological system, sometimes there may be inaccuracies in the data. If you’d like to contest the data because you believe it’s incorrect, please talk to the class team owner, check if they use Education Insights and let them know about your concern. If needed, they can file a support ticket.

• Note: Support tickets can only be filed by educators. 

Transparency

• Collecting data about students is an important part of being an educator. Having an informed understanding of how students participate in class helps them to identify student needs and provide targeted support. As a student, you deserve to know what kind of data your educator is seeing about you – we've written this article to provide that transparency. With Microsoft Teams for Education, the data collected about you is focused on providing support, shared only with appropriate school faculty, and protected by rigorous privacy regulations.