FERPA and Canvas Crosslisting/Incompletes/Manual Enrollments
Last updated by neal.legler 4 years agoWhat does FERPA law say about exposing student schedules and other PII?
FERPA Grants students the right to provide consent for the release of personally identifiable information in their educational records to third parties.
Certain directory information can be released without consent. However, USU doesn't currently list a student schedule as directory information. It could, so long as it notified students.
According to FERPA, A student cannot request to remain anonymous in an in-person or distance education classroom . However, some notable opinions (particularly this one by consultant and former DoE Policy Compliance Office Director LeRoy Rooker ) provide the interpretation that this limitation doesn't permit the disclosure of attendance to another class. This interpretation was provided directly in response to a question about crosslisting for convenience purposes.
This appears to be the extent of any official or quasi-official guidance on the question.
Some FERPA language refers to "reasonable methods." Although there is no direct application of this concept to the question above, some general insights can be found in this summary on FERPA exceptions and in this summary of best practices when using online educational services , which details the expectations of third-parties who use FERPA data and what we need to ensure they are doing before we use their services.
Approach the registrar's office if there are special situations. The student may need to be re-registered in the course.
Possible response when asked to crosslist courses that don’t belong together:
Combining courses that aren’t taught at the same time is generally frowned on by the Registrar’s office for FERPA reasons, in that it permits students to see the enrollments of students in a course they aren’t themselves enrolled in.
That said:
Merging two sections is not entirely out of the question. FERPA doesn’t say students absolutely cannot see enrollments for other courses—just that all students must consent before such information is shared. So, if we were to merge your two sections, we’d need to allow students in each combined class to consent to it.
It might also be possible to get the schedulers to merge the sections together in Banner, but they won’t usually do that for sections taught at different times, for the reasons shared above.
There’s also a possibility to create a Blueprint course that syncs with several associated courses so that changes can be made in one place and synced across multiple courses. This works pretty well, but does require some care to make sure changes are always made in the blueprint so that the sync doesn’t get broken.
Hope that helps! I’m happy to try to help with whatever works best for you.
