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Protecting Student Privacy Without Going FERPANUTS

November 30, 2011, 8:00 am

By Amy Cavender

Back in November, Georgia Tech took down their wikis, claiming that they constituted a FERPA violation. This stirred up quite a discussion on Twitter, as well as on blogs and podcasts (see, for instance this and this).

Decisions such as the one taken by Georgia Tech are troubling, and undermine the kinds of work many readers of this blog do with their students. Nonetheless, student control of their work is important—especially when that work is (or may be) made public. Certainly there are ways (such as allowing students to use pseudonyms or to restrict access to their work, without taking it down) to meet legitimate student concerns, though, without backing away from having students present some of their work online, in public spaces.

So let’s hear from you, readers—what do you do to address students’ reasonable privacy concerns while continuing to ask them to work in public, online environments? Let us know in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by the author.]

This entry was posted in Profession, Software, Teaching and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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  • nick_carbone

    Years ago when I was at UMass, Amherst, in the PhD program and teaching a college writing course as a TA, I was being observed by Charlie Moran as I did an assignment where students were to write — and then send — a letter to the editor. I was insisting in the assignment that they mail it and try to get it published.

    After the class, when Charlie and I walked through the observation, he noted that requiring writers to publish, or more accurately to submit their writing for publication, went against the ethos of the course where writers are the authors and ‘author’ities of their own work. The requirement went beyond the bounds of understanding of the classroom, one which stated that student work would be shared in the class, among students.

    It was one thing, he noted, to ask students to write a letter, but another to send it. Writing a letter to the editor as requirement for a class is different than choosing to write a letter to the editor because you want to say something to the community that reads a newspaper’s letters page. Being moved to write and send and being required to write and send are too different things.

    And so, sending the letter became an option. To encourage students, I offered to pay for postage, and so students who wanted to send came to class with envelopes stuffed and addressed, and I collected those, and took them to the post office. Students who sent got extra credit, and students who got published were given a free, Ticonderoga 2 word processor. In other words, honoring their right to choose when to publish spurred the assignment to evolve a bit, to become more fun for those who chose that option. It livened the classroom and helped move the notion of publishing from forced to free, from dread to desire.

    I have thought since then that _requiring_ any student writer to make their writing public beyond the classroom is wrong. Technological options and course catalog options can support the student writer’s ability to opt in.

    Thus a course catalog designation or description can be created for a course that might require students to keep a public blog or to write in a public wiki. If the course catalog cannot be adjusted so that students have the option to take a different course if they like, then the course itself should make public writing optional. There are versions of wikis, blogs, and other technologies that can be password protected and kept to class groups, and there are ways for members of that group to opt to make their work public.

  • jwluther

    I’m so glad ya’ll are posting on this. I’m currently mapping a composition course that puts digital writing to the forefront and I’ve been concerned with this issue. I appreciate Nick’s post and it makes me wonder if folks have specific suggestions on how to give students options with their respective interfaces without bogging classes (and their instructors) down with layers of navigational roadblocks (I’ve had some frustrating experiences with students logging into locked Google Sites, for example). Moreover, (how) can instructors design courses that prepare students for 21st century literacies that don’t make some sort of public turn? 

  • jackdrty

    Great timing on you post, Amy, as I spent the morning re-reading some of the FERPANUTS coverage and deciding how to address this issue in my class. I decided to add the statement below to the guidelines of the web project for my undergraduate seminar (which you can read in full at http://commons.trincoll.edu/cssp/writing/web-project-guidelines/):

    Public scholarship and student privacy: This assignment requires students to write for public audiences and be judged by guest evaluators, because our ideas become clearer and more valuable when we share them widely and receive feedback. Comments by evaluators, peers, and general audiences are posted publicly, but all grades are sent privately to individual students, in accordance with the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The instructor promises to preserve student web projects online (and remove any inappropriate comments) for at least two years after the seminar (or longer, if feasible), so that students may include links to their work on their resumes or personal websites. Students have the right to change the visibility of their work to “password protected” (as long as that password is sent to the instructor, who will forward it to the guest evaluators), or after the final evaluation, to delete it entirely from the site. Students who agreed to partner on this project must reach these decisions jointly.

    Feedback is welcome, as always.

  • acavender

    This semester I’ve told students that a site would be public, but also talked with them about what that means, and offered the possibility of posting under a pseudonym, so that no one other than the student and I need know identities. Of course, anything even remotely resembling a grade is *never* made public.

    @chronicle-fe10286e3549ae6446717e70d3b06f37:disqus Thanks for sharing your statement–it’s really helpful.

  • http://twitter.com/JamesOCull James O’Cull

    Most students don’t care about FERPA – stuffy administrators do. If students cared in the slightest none of them would have Facebook accounts. Have them sign a FERPA waiver and get back to work! If they don’t want to waive then provide alternate ways to earn credit.

  • http://twitter.com/lynnelynne53 Lynne Siemens

    My colleague and I have been thinking about this issue and recently worked with a student to examine students’ perceptions of privacy and their engagement in their courses generally.  Most of the online course is conducted in Moodle, but there is always potential that students’ comments may be made public.  Further, some of my colleagues are experimenting with facebook, twitter, etc.  We found that while they stated that they had no concerns and did not know the university policies on the topic, they actively took steps to protect their privacy and expected instructors to do the same.  (the full report can be found at http://distance.uvic.ca/pdfs/Privacy-Concerns-and-Student-Engagement.pdf).  Building from this initial research, we are now looking at instructors’ understanding of privacy and how it accords with the students’ perspectives.

  • keupher

    I think it is really important to keep the spaces where we learn private. Students need to ability to test out ideas within a safe environment that is protected from outside search engines. We need an opportunity to test ideas and fail without a future prospective employer able to access student work. Materials that are public in the digital world lose their contextual basis and therefore can be misinterpreted at a later time.  

    Therefore, if I have students post and reflect, I do it all within the confines of a password protected website. Password protection is not perfect but at least it is an honest step at protecting a student’s right to be a student.

  • fbat3

    We call the privacy laws something else on our campus, but it sounds just as strange (Canadian). I truly think what you’ve raised needs to come to public debate and involve the students.  I asked students whether they thought teaching evaluations should be anonymous or not.  I dislike the fact that they can trash a prof for bizarre reasons or raise bad teachers to the heavens just because they got a good grade.  The debate erupted.  But the common factor was whether or not they were afraid of retaliation down the line.  Some said that people should put their name to anything they are willing to all the truth.  Others come from small dept’s and are afraid of getting the same prof again and being punished.  But the primary division is, for me, not the how of privacy, but the what and why?
    I think it’s gone too far when I can’t mutter, “good work” to a student when I hand a paper back, in case another student feels diminished or wants to compare his or her work with that student.  They’ll do what they want.  Privacy is fine, but when it crosses into coddling, well….
    It’s one of the reasons I’m taking early retirement.  Senior students can take some of the criticism; they’ve learned to read.  But our high schools are afraid of the students and we’re paying that price.
    Sorry, this is a rant, and not to productive.  But what constitutes private information?
    I don’t know who is breaking the law by recording a lecture with their e-devices without asking me first?  I don’t know what students pass around outside the class.  Where are the lines?  Who is afraid of what?

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