Privacy Best Practices for SIS provisioned courses
Introduction/Purpose
In some setting configurations, students can see other student information across course sections. Course sections in Bruin Learn are used to segment the people in a class, typically based on their TA or meeting times. Classes with discussion sections or labs in the Schedule of Classes will automatically have corresponding Bruin Learn sections.
In order to remain FERPA compliant, Bruin Learn settings will be updated to prevent this. The change to settings will take effect the week of 4/25/22.
TAs, Instructors, Designers and Admins should not revert or modify these settings as they protect the privacy of students.
Potentially relevant background info: FERPA for Faculty | UCLA Registrar's Office
Setting Changes
Hide Sections
The setting “Hide sections on the People page from students” will be enabled in Course Settings for all Student Information Systems (SIS) provisioned academic courses and TA sites created to-date for the Spring ’22 and Summer ’22 terms.
This will also be applied for all sites and terms going forward.
This setting is only apparent in the Canvas user interface when a site has more than one section.
If/when a second section is added to an academic course or TA site that originally only had one section, this latent setting will take effect immediately.
Limit Visibility to Section
The setting “limit this user to only see fellow section users” will be enabled for student enrollments in all TA sites created to-date for the Spring ’22 term.
This will also be applied for all TA sites and terms going forward.
This will result in preventing students from viewing or interacting with students in sections other than their own if/when TA sites for multiple discussion sections are manually cross-listed. (Note that this setting is already being applied to student enrollments in “unofficial” cross-listed academic course sites.)
Conversations
The permission setting “Conversations - send messages to individual course members” will be disabled for the “Student” and “Participant” roles at the root account level to prevent users with these roles from viewing section information and enrollments when composing a new message in the Canvas Inbox.
Maintain FERPA Privacy in Courses
Remove Chat and Conferences
On the Course Navigation, confirm that the Chat and Conferences items are hidden from students.
If they are active (appearing in the top grouping of navigation items), navigate to the Settings menu and disable them.
Configure Course Details
Under the Course Details tab, scroll down and click more options.
Confirm the following settings:
- Let students create discussion topics is NOT checked
- FERPA risk - students may inadvertently create a discussion for all sections
- Let students organize their own groups is NOT checked
- FERPA risk - Students may set up groups of students that include students from other sections
- Disable comments on announcements IS checked
- FERPA risk - if this setting is selected, students from all sections will be able to add comments to Announcements
- Click the Update Course Details button at bottom.
Creating Discussion Groups
Creating groups based on sections is especially helpful when you want students to communicate in a discussion activity with only students from their section. When setting up the groups, make sure to select the checkbox “Require group members to be in the same section”.
For more information, see the video: Create Groups Based on Course Sections in Bruin Learn
Links to an external site.
Zoom
Best practices when recording Zoom lectures:
- Protect your students by not recording them.
- Use the Zoom Spotlight feature Links to an external site. to record only the presenter’s/instructor’s video.
- Follow UCLA guidelines for security and privacy protection, which can be found at the following link, under item C: Protecting Privacy & Data During Remote Working & Using Zoom.
- Record your Zoom lectures to the cloud. Students can access the cloud recordings by signing into their secure Bruin Learn course site.
3rd Party Tools
If you choose to use 3rd party public tools (e.g. blogs, wikis) include a FERPA statement in your syllabus reminding students not to include any personally identifiable information.
Additionally, include a link in the syllabus to the external technology privacy policy. You can generally find privacy policy statements on 3rd party tool websites.