FERPA

[StacyRoeming]

I am an admin for the first time for a high school that has a handful of beginning users of Canvas. I have had a tricky FERPA question brought up by a Canvas teacher user: a teacher is beginning the school year with students in a discipline alternative education setting. They are synced through Clever into her high school courses, but, by law, 1) Are not supposed to communicate with peers in their high school course, and 2) are to be hidden from view from other students. I know about the People Navigation tab moving to hidden, but she is concerned that she will make a mistake when assigning discussions or collaborations.

The teacher wants to have the students taken out of the synced course (which is synced through Skyward and not possible) and added to a course she has manually created. Then, she wants to cross-list the manual course to the synced course. Is this a viable option? If so, do I deactivate the user in the synced course?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @StacyRoeming,

I came across this unanswered question while doing a cleanup of the community.

I'm a higher-ed Canvas admin, and from my perspective, this probably all needs to be handled more on the SIS (Clever) more than the Canvas side.  You can definitely manually add students to the manual course, but that will mean things won't sync back to Clever at any point (unsure how important that is).  You also will still have students in the main course which you don't want.  I don't quite understand the comment about crosslisting things, as that would put the manual section right back in the main course, which is the opposite of what is desired.

Form the Canvas perspective, the ideal would be if a separate course/section was created in Clever with these students enrolled, which the sync with Canvas should then set up properly.  You may get told it's not possible to do in Clever though...  These are always tricky situations, so I'd recommend having conversations with the entire Canvas team and registration team at your school to see if some kind of compromise can be found that would work for everyone.

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