Setting a course visibility to public

[kristin_bayless]

I've noticed that many of our teachers have set their Canvas course visibility to public on their scheduled courses.  Some of these courses have submissions and grades, so the students must be logging in first and then going to the course.  Public access limits what the person can see, but it does give access to assignments and modules.

Does anyone see any issues with the teachers setting their course visibility to public?  This is deliberate, so they have their reasons.  I'd like to hear what your concerns would be if you were to see your teachers changing a scheduled course to public access.  Thank you!

[akkaufmann]

Hi  @kristin_bayless ,

T‌here are two areas of concern I would consider.

The first is any potential intellectual property and copyright violations. If you are using content from a textbook or any other source, you may be violating a contract, terms of service, or other policy by "freely" distributing the content. It could also be a violation of your own school's policy depending on how it defines ownership for institutionally or teacher created content.

The second, and more pressing, is the likely FERPA (or other privacy law) violation. If the "People" page is visible in the course, anyone with the link to the course can view all the members of the course including teachers and students.

When we create public courses for my institution, they are only informational courses and do not have any officially enrolled students.

Alex 

[kristin_bayless]

Alexander, thank you for your response!

Based on your comments, I thought I'd do a bit more testing on the access to enrollments. First, I enabled People in navigation.  Next, I accessed the course through the public view.  The People navigation item was not visible.  Finally, , if I changed the course URL to include /users after the course number. That link directed me to the Canvas login screen.  FERPA is my greatest concern.  If you or anyone reading this has a way to give access to enrollments using the Public view, I'd appreciate knowing about it.  Our students would definitely find it, so we'd need to shut this down.

[sphinney]

I don't have anything that would help you, Kristie, but thank you for asking this question. Before I read your question, I did not realize that users who are not logged in and are viewing a site that is set to public access had restricted permissions. After reading your post, I tried to find documentation that shows the permissions that are set for public access users but could not find anything. It would be nice to have that information including in permissions documentation.

[crafte]

Following is a link to a PDF posted by Instructure, which provides information concerning course visibility options. 

https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/CanvasCourseVisibilityOptions.pdf 

[sphinney]

Awesome! Thank you,  @crafte ‌.