The Need For Privacy: FERPA and Title IX

John_Lowe · ‎08-19-2016

If you haven't already seen the active discussion posted here ( New FERPA requirements for cross-listed courses! ), LeRoy Rooker, the director of the United States Department of Education's Family Policy Compliance Office, recently answered a question on the AACRAO website where someone asked about cross-listing courses in the LMS. The answer given greatly shook up many institutions:

The language concerns the student who has opted out of disclosures under the "directory information" exception to signed consent. This permits the institution to identify that student in the class that the student is attending, but an institution could not use this limitation on the student to then permit the disclosure of the attendance information to another class. (Ask the FERPA Professor| resources| AACRAO)

Essentially, students in Section A have no expectation of not being identified to other students in Section A, but opted-out students in Section A do have a FERPA protected right to not be identified to students in Section B. It appears that the door remains open for true, in-person, cross-listed courses since those students meet at the same time in the same physical classroom attending class with each other. This does, however, limit courses where one instructor teaches four sections of the same course and simply wants to cross-list those into one course in Canvas for their own convenience where the students would not normally attend class with each other in the physical classroom.

Another scenario to consider is related to Title IX. Due to Title IX, we have had, and could have more situations, where a student is moved from one section to another to avoid contact with another student in the same section. If that were to occur and sections have been combined in Canvas, those same students could potentially be put back into contact with one another by the institution in Canvas.

Course-based LTI integrations are also a cause of privacy concern for many institutions as discussed during an excellent presentation at InstructureCon 2016 titled LTIs and FERPA and in a feature discussion:

Unlike all the other content types included in this permission, which are all native to Canvas, LTI tools have the ability pass through a great deal of student data to a third-party site. This can create legal risks around FERPA and other laws related to student records and privacy. ( )

What can you do to help?

The most important thing that you can do to help is to make your voice heard -- talk to your CSM, talk to the Instructure leadership team participating in the forums like @jared , talk to your Registrar or your CIO on your own campus, and participate in the online discussions here in the community.

Several excellent solutions have been discussed so far including a section-based privacy wall. Visit these topics to join the discussion and vote for these feature requests:

jared · ‎08-19-2016

Thanks, @John_Lowe for consolidating some of these threads and summarizing the scenarios.

tl;dr: The Canvas team is currently thinking through how we can preserve the benefits of teacher cross-listing and LTI, while helping institutions protect student privacy and adhere to policy.

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First and foremost, it's incumbent on Instructure to not violate student privacy / create FERPA violations ourselves. We're extremely careful in how we manage data, surface information in Canvas, etc. -- all with student privacy in mind. However, there are always going to be features in any product that allow a user to take an action that violates the law, and the current example of cross-listing is one of those. This is partly addressed through admin tools that let institutions choose how to limit user powers (e.g. the "Students can opt-in" option discussed in this thread), but I think it's important to just note that "with great power comes great responsibility," and user agency will always figure in to these discussions.

Enough pre-amble.

There are two main questions as I see it:

1. Can we improve Canvas cross-listing capabilities so teachers can still benefit from this feature without risking student privacy?

The goal of our cross-listing feature is to save teachers time when dealing with truly cross-listed courses (i.e. catalog-listed), but also multiple sections of the same course, when appropriate. So while an institution could simply say, we're going to re-define courses and sections to address FERPA, or, alternatively, we are not going to allow teachers to use the Canvas cross-listing feature, we do think we can find a way for you to eat your cake and have it, too.

To this end, we're currently looking at this challenge under the larger theme of making teaching at scale better and easier in Canvas. I think that's the right context to consider this, because many teachers think of a manually cross-listed course as a single large course, with some differentiation. Indeed, some of the ideas for improving Canvas cross-listing have tied in to other feature enhancement ideas around Section-awareness, or Section-Group synchronization . The current "restrict students from seeing" option already gets us very close to a solution -- indeed, it seems to except for in courses that use whole-class discussions, but in order to solve all kinds of courses equally well, this will take a little bit of thought.

2. How do we solve the LTI-related challenge of student privacy in external tools, period, but specifically for FERPA compliance?

While cross-listing tends to be a feature for convenience and time-savings for some teachers, the LTI challenge, to me, is a reflection of a much larger challenge that we all face in a broadly connected, app-driven society. As LTI and the Edu App Center have taken off, the convenience of plugging out to third-party tools certainly also opens up new concerns around student privacy that we all must consider. And so the next stage in the evolution of LTI and our support for Edu Apps must consider new ways to give institutions the powers and controls they need to ensure policy is not compromised.

I'm going to ask @mloble , our VP of Platform and Partners (and both co-chair of the IMS Privacy Committee and member of the new IMS LTI Product Steering Committee) if she has any additional info that we can share at this point.

John_Lowe · ‎08-23-2016

I’ve created these three screenshot/mockups of what it looks like now and could possibly look like going forward. The first is a screenshot of the User enrollment settings that already exist. The second is a mockup of what could be added to Course Settings to toggle all of the enrollment settings. The third is a mockup of what could be added to the Account Settings to enable or disable that checkbox on the Course Settings by default.

Stef_retired · ‎02-13-2017

Here's your chance to ask @jared ‌! Be sure to RSVP to the https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/canvaslive?sr=search&searchId=047c73fe-c1ce-4d7d-9ff... event https://community.canvaslms.com/events/1925-ask-me-anything-jared-stein-vp-product-strategy-for-he-i... which is coming up this Wednesday, February 15, 2017. RSVP “yes” if you will be there--and if you’re interested, but your schedule doesn’t allow you to attend in real time, RSVP "no" or "maybe" to receive all event updates. Your RSVP ensures that you will receive a notification should the event be cancelled or changed.