I was surprised, given some of the native tension between Edtech and FERPA enforcers, how much common-ground we found at our initial meeting. I think it is because FERPA is, at heart, about students controlling their educational process, and we are, at our core, about that too.

Part of the thing here is we are helping the FERPA people too — they know they need to get their message out more systematically — so as much as I hate the term win-win, it’s a, well — it’s potentially good for everyone.

It seems to me that as educational technologists we need to approach FERPA as something that protects both our students and our institutions, and each of those paths require specific solutions. We’ve been lax in enforcing a TOS at sign up (for fear that too much explicit legalese might curtail our growth), and need to address that. We’ve been much better, if entirely unsystematic, about advising faculty about granular privacy control and the implications of openness.

The collaborative development of boilerplate, or “contracts,” that meet each of these functions and are automatically part of the process of administering and supporting online teaching tools (via both syllabi and TOSs) is both interesting and necessary, and doesn’t need to be painful. I’m excited to follow and learn from (and steal liberally from) what you guys develop!