How to: Comply with FERPA after Merging Sections

FERPA and Canvas Merged Sections

When course sections that do not meet together are merged or cross-listed into a single Canvas course primarily for administrative convenience, instructors should take steps to ensure student privacy and compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Specifically, students in courses with cross-listed sections should not be permitted to see or interact with students in sections other than their own unless the sections share a common meeting place and time.

Steps to Ensure Student Privacy

To prevent students from seeing students in other sections in your course, you’ll need to disable or lock down tools that expose information about students in other sections:

Settings:

Under Settings > Course Details > more options, make sure the selections are as follows:

  • Check Disable comments on announcements
  • Uncheck Let students create discussion topics
  • Uncheck Let students organize their own groups

Under Settings > Navigationdisable the following tools, which expose the names of students who use them:

  • Chat
  • Conferences
  • Collaborations

People:

Disable the “People” menu option that allows students to see the entire course roster for all sections. When adding other People to your course, add only those users in their section only, and add them to only the sections for which they are responsible.

More Information on Adding People to your Canvas Courses.

Groups:

The names of all students are visible when students organize their own groups, regardless of section assignment. When creating groups, require group members to be in the same section.

Chat:

The names of all students who post are visible, regardless of section assignment. Create separate groups for each section. Students can then chat with group members, all of whom will be in their own section.

Discussions:

If you use Discussions, create separate groups for each section of students and assign each discussion to the separate group. The names of all students who post are visible, regardless of section assignment.

For graded discussions, create differentiated discussion topics restricted to individual sections.

For ungraded discussions, use the “Post to” option to post topics to individual sections instead of the entire class.

Messages/Inbox:

When sending a Canvas message to two or more students in different sections, check Send an individual message to each recipient. This will send a separate copy to each recipient and hide the names of the recipients in the message header.

Whenever you share or cause to be shared student information within a course or section(s) ensure that no student within the course or section has invoked a FERPA hold on all of their directory and non-directory information.