Universities are considering monitoring students' private emails for "negative comments" to judge if they are at risk of quitting, it has been revealed.
Loughborough University is looking at tracking students' relationships with their tutors and analysing text interactions in order to gauge how negatively a student feels about the course - and whether they are thinking of dropping out, the Guardian reports.
Rob Englebright, programme manager at champions of technology in education JISC, warned universities may identify students most likely to leave cut support for them, or stop recruiting demographics most likely to drop out.
"If a student hasn't attended the library, do you intervene to prevent them failing, or in a cynical way do you say we will get rid of them early?" he told the Guardian.
We asked you how you'd feel about your emails being read - and whether this constituted an invasion of privacy.
A spokesperson for Loughborough University said it was merely looking at monitoring emails and had not implemented the policy.
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