LearnerPrivacy.org

In this episode, we break character and instead of being dark and foreboding - Dr. Chuck talks about an area of learner privacy that he is happy about. You will probably be surprised what product is on his "nice list". Through a combination of how a teacher uses a product and how a school configured a product, we can find a middle ground where we can teach successfully and minimize unnecessary risk of the loss of control of student private data. Support the show

In this episode we explore a fictional scenario where an activist billionaire purchases a proprietary cloud hosted LMS vendor to build their own on-line university. Support the show

In this episode we look at how various surveillance technologies end up recording information about us. We look at how we invite these technologies into our lives and the short and long term impacts of these technologies. We look at how Ring doorbells do work and how they should (but never will) work. We talk about cloud services we can and cannot trust. We look at how different forms of Covid surveillance work and which ones are well or poorly engineered. Support the show

In this fictional campfire story, we take a look at a community college English teacher and their students and how they get caught up in events happening in society. They end up being investigated by law enforcement out of an abundance of caution because their cell phone serial numbers were recorded by a Stingray device in a van parked near a protest march. The Law enforcement gets a subpoena to look at some of the students learning activity data out of an abundance of caution. Spoiler...

In this episode, we look at the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Europe has a long history of thinking more deeply and formally about privacy than the US. We start by looking at the 1995 Data Protection Directive - which laid down a great set of principles long before the widespread use of the Internet or Cloud. Then in 2000 as a reaction to US world-scale applications like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the EU developed the Safe Harbor principles, which US companies fought and...

In this episode, we look at why higher education moved from self-hosted learning systems to completely outsourced systems between 2010 and 2020. We look at some of the problems of self-hosted LMS systems and how higher education IT was not ready to move into the cloud and maintain "ownership" of their LMS infrastructure. Choosing a 100% out-sourced could LMS turns out to be an excellent temporary move that has allowed IT departments to build expertise on cloud services like Amazon. But it is...

In this episode we look at FERPA in the context of other privacy frameworks and laws like FOIA, HIPAA, and HITech. We compare FERPA to medical privacy records and look at how campuses need to move beyond FERPA to examine the real issues of learner privacy. Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams Support the show

I look at the last 20 years of progress in educational technology and while have made great strides in improving interoperability, we have moved from having each campus 100% maintaining possession their learner's private data to the point where the there is no learner private data under the direct control of many universities. Private student data is often spread across 15 or more vendor systems. It is time to understand and explore the trade off of outsourcing student identity and private...