Putting my teaching materials on Google Drive rather than Blackboard

[downer]

Written as the people who have never had to fill out the compliance reports or deal with the fallout when the regional accreditors, auditors, or others did some spot checks and found enough problems to warrant going on probation with the accrediting body or having to post a letter of credit to continue offering federal financial aid.

Please, please follow the "bullshit" local directives related to FERPA, length and number of class meetings, and amount of work assigned during the term or anything else that comes down the pike.  Ask questions that you need to ask, but don't just assume something inconvenient to you is just bullshit.

Yes, definitely, will do.

Where's the evil grin emoticon?

[ciao_yall]

The above said, I periodically fight with IT staff who claim that ALL records pertaining to student performance can only be stored on university-approved equipment and software. Well, guess what, Microsoft OneDrive sucks, we don't have 24/7 IT support, and remote access to university servers frequently goes on the fritz at the end of the semester. So I'm going to continue to use my own devices and storage solutions to back things up. But students don't have direct access to that information.

Generally the people who work for IT seem like nice people, even if they don't always have great social skills. But, as with many deans, their jobs require them to set out directives and justifications that are complete bullsh1t. I find that ignoring most of it works best, and that's what most other faculty seem to do too.

Yes, until a hacker manages to get that information. That's a real mess.

[downer]

The above said, I periodically fight with IT staff who claim that ALL records pertaining to student performance can only be stored on university-approved equipment and software. Well, guess what, Microsoft OneDrive sucks, we don't have 24/7 IT support, and remote access to university servers frequently goes on the fritz at the end of the semester. So I'm going to continue to use my own devices and storage solutions to back things up. But students don't have direct access to that information.

Generally the people who work for IT seem like nice people, even if they don't always have great social skills. But, as with many deans, their jobs require them to set out directives and justifications that are complete bullsh1t. I find that ignoring most of it works best, and that's what most other faculty seem to do too.

Yes, until a hacker manages to get that information. That's a real mess.

These days I just leave all grade data on Blackboard in its crappy gradebook. It does mean that I have to simplify the grading in ways that are not ideal, but grading isn't an exact science anyway, and it makes life simpler. Using Excel would give me more ability to calculate grades in sophisticated ways, which is what I used to do, but it's more work.

Student papers are mostly on turnitin.com but sometimes I download copies to my own drive. I am not worried about them getting hacked.

But theoretically speaking, suppose a hacker gets student grades from my cloud drive. Suppose they even make some changes. Who is ever going to know? 

Seems to me that there is more danger of the university accounts in Banner of getting hacked. Isn't that what happened in this case from 2017?

[Caracal]

The above said, I periodically fight with IT staff who claim that ALL records pertaining to student performance can only be stored on university-approved equipment and software. Well, guess what, Microsoft OneDrive sucks, we don't have 24/7 IT support, and remote access to university servers frequently goes on the fritz at the end of the semester. So I'm going to continue to use my own devices and storage solutions to back things up. But students don't have direct access to that information.

Generally the people who work for IT seem like nice people, even if they don't always have great social skills. But, as with many deans, their jobs require them to set out directives and justifications that are complete bullsh1t. I find that ignoring most of it works best, and that's what most other faculty seem to do too.

Yes, until a hacker manages to get that information. That's a real mess.

These days I just leave all grade data on Blackboard in its crappy gradebook. It does mean that I have to simplify the grading in ways that are not ideal, but grading isn't an exact science anyway, and it makes life simpler. Using Excel would give me more ability to calculate grades in sophisticated ways, which is what I used to do, but it's more work.

Student papers are mostly on turnitin.com but sometimes I download copies to my own drive. I am not worried about them getting hacked.

But theoretically speaking, suppose a hacker gets student grades from my cloud drive. Suppose they even make some changes. Who is ever going to know? 

Seems to me that there is more danger of the university accounts in Banner of getting hacked. Isn't that what happened in this case from 2017?

I figure that if someone hacks into the LMS or everything gets erased, that won't be my fault and nobody is going to blame me (as long as they didn't use the password I left in the classroom or something) That's kind of what I'm looking for with things like this. I'm sure it would be a mess if something happened, but we'd all muddle through. What I don't want is it to be something caused by me doing my own thing.

[ciao_yall]

The above said, I periodically fight with IT staff who claim that ALL records pertaining to student performance can only be stored on university-approved equipment and software. Well, guess what, Microsoft OneDrive sucks, we don't have 24/7 IT support, and remote access to university servers frequently goes on the fritz at the end of the semester. So I'm going to continue to use my own devices and storage solutions to back things up. But students don't have direct access to that information.

Generally the people who work for IT seem like nice people, even if they don't always have great social skills. But, as with many deans, their jobs require them to set out directives and justifications that are complete bullsh1t. I find that ignoring most of it works best, and that's what most other faculty seem to do too.

Yes, until a hacker manages to get that information. That's a real mess.

These days I just leave all grade data on Blackboard in its crappy gradebook. It does mean that I have to simplify the grading in ways that are not ideal, but grading isn't an exact science anyway, and it makes life simpler. Using Excel would give me more ability to calculate grades in sophisticated ways, which is what I used to do, but it's more work.

Student papers are mostly on turnitin.com but sometimes I download copies to my own drive. I am not worried about them getting hacked.

But theoretically speaking, suppose a hacker gets student grades from my cloud drive. Suppose they even make some changes. Who is ever going to know? 

Seems to me that there is more danger of the university accounts in Banner of getting hacked. Isn't that what happened in this case from 2017?

I figure that if someone hacks into the LMS or everything gets erased, that won't be my fault and nobody is going to blame me (as long as they didn't use the password I left in the classroom or something) That's kind of what I'm looking for with things like this. I'm sure it would be a mess if something happened, but we'd all muddle through. What I don't want is it to be something caused by me doing my own thing.

Yes.

We finally had to go to an automated system for our Community Ed registrations. It was literally 100% manual and a massive security risk, not to mention grossly inefficient.

So, of course we had a very complicated system of discounts and credits that could be managed by the longtime staffers in the area. The new system simply couldn't handle the process, or would have taken a very long time to program. Our team had to simplify routines and, well, not everyone got the discounts they were going to get. We also adjusted our pricing and I made sure that I gave our team flexibility to give discounts "if anyone complained."

Good news is, credit card data is now 100% safe... or at least the responsibility of the processing bank.

[polly_mer]

Written as the people who have never had to fill out the compliance reports or deal with the fallout when the regional accreditors, auditors, or others did some spot checks and found enough problems to warrant going on probation with the accrediting body or having to post a letter of credit to continue offering federal financial aid.

Please, please follow the "bullshit" local directives related to FERPA, length and number of class meetings, and amount of work assigned during the term or anything else that comes down the pike.  Ask questions that you need to ask, but don't just assume something inconvenient to you is just bullshit.

Yes, definitely, will do.

Where's the evil grin emoticon?

It's no longer my problem to file any of that paperwork.  Grin away!

[Mercudenton]

Last year I used Google Classroom. This allows you to provide the same assignment to students, who can then type into it. It then automatically creates as many copies as students in your Google folder, with each students' notes in (This makes it different to the standard Google Doc). I assigned handouts on Google Clasroom, students typed into them and I had a record of their notes (which created some measure of accountability for note taking.) However, IT shut down the facility this year saying it was not compliant with FERPA. I asked if I could continue to use it only for handouts (no grades) but they said no. But I know larger universities use it.

[eigen]

Last year I used Google Classroom. This allows you to provide the same assignment to students, who can then type into it. It then automatically creates as many copies as students in your Google folder, with each students' notes in (This makes it different to the standard Google Doc). I assigned handouts on Google Clasroom, students typed into them and I had a record of their notes (which created some measure of accountability for note taking.) However, IT shut down the facility this year saying it was not compliant with FERPA. I asked if I could continue to use it only for handouts (no grades) but they said no. But I know larger universities use it.

I'm curious, is your school a google suite school? My understanding is that the google for education services are FERPA compliant, but the non-education specific services are not.

[dr_codex]

To the OP:

We just got a memo that all courses had to be approved to run in Blackboard. Moreover, any iteration of a course can only be poured from the approved master shell. (I've got some theories about why that particular clause was inserted....) My assumption is that storage outside the LMS would not be approved.

This is only for fully online courses, so far. I assume that hybrid and web-enhanced courses can run in any way, as long as it is FERPA compliant.

We have a mandatory meeting later in the month, required of all online instructors. My feeling is that the compliance and assessment folks are coming.

[downer]

To the OP:

We just got a memo that all courses had to be approved to run in Blackboard. Moreover, any iteration of a course can only be poured from the approved master shell. (I've got some theories about why that particular clause was inserted....) My assumption is that storage outside the LMS would not be approved.

This is only for fully online courses, so far. I assume that hybrid and web-enhanced courses can run in any way, as long as it is FERPA compliant.

We have a mandatory meeting later in the month, required of all online instructors. My feeling is that the compliance and assessment folks are coming.

How annoying for instructors. I guess there's also the question of whether people will actually attend the "mandatory" meeting -- there's a thread on that topic too! I teach just online for one school, and I never go there for any meetings.

I wonder where in the accreditation requirements it says that online courses have to include all their materials within the LMS. Would that be driven by compliance with disability laws? (The irony is that is is often much easier to increase font size and make documents more accessible in Google Docs than it is in Blackboard.)

I also wonder how strict enforcement could possibly be. Are they really going to employ someone to go over every online course and check that it complies with this?

[lightning]

To the OP:

We just got a memo that all courses had to be approved to run in Blackboard. Moreover, any iteration of a course can only be poured from the approved master shell. (I've got some theories about why that particular clause was inserted....) My assumption is that storage outside the LMS would not be approved.

This is only for fully online courses, so far. I assume that hybrid and web-enhanced courses can run in any way, as long as it is FERPA compliant.

We have a mandatory meeting later in the month, required of all online instructors. My feeling is that the compliance and assessment folks are coming.

How annoying for instructors. I guess there's also the question of whether people will actually attend the "mandatory" meeting -- there's a thread on that topic too! I teach just online for one school, and I never go there for any meetings.

I wonder where in the accreditation requirements it says that online courses have to include all their materials within the LMS. Would that be driven by compliance with disability laws? (The irony is that is is often much easier to increase font size and make documents more accessible in Google Docs than it is in Blackboard.)

I also wonder how strict enforcement could possibly be. Are they really going to employ someone to go over every online course and check that it complies with this?

Yes. There's a position that was created about four years ago, at my university, where the person's job is to go through the LMS for fully online courses, to make sure that the courses comply with the requirements of the Assessment office, the Disabilities office, FERPA, General Counsel's Office, Instructional Design Office, IT, & Lord knows what else. Speaking to your earlier point, sometimes it's easier to let the higher-ups create a template, with all of these built in, and then faculty add content on top of the framework, because you don't want the aforementioned busy-body annoying  you.

[downer]

To the OP:

We just got a memo that all courses had to be approved to run in Blackboard. Moreover, any iteration of a course can only be poured from the approved master shell. (I've got some theories about why that particular clause was inserted....) My assumption is that storage outside the LMS would not be approved.

This is only for fully online courses, so far. I assume that hybrid and web-enhanced courses can run in any way, as long as it is FERPA compliant.

We have a mandatory meeting later in the month, required of all online instructors. My feeling is that the compliance and assessment folks are coming.

How annoying for instructors. I guess there's also the question of whether people will actually attend the "mandatory" meeting -- there's a thread on that topic too! I teach just online for one school, and I never go there for any meetings.

I wonder where in the accreditation requirements it says that online courses have to include all their materials within the LMS. Would that be driven by compliance with disability laws? (The irony is that is is often much easier to increase font size and make documents more accessible in Google Docs than it is in Blackboard.)

I also wonder how strict enforcement could possibly be. Are they really going to employ someone to go over every online course and check that it complies with this?

Yes. There's a position that was created about four years ago, at my university, where the person's job is to go through the LMS for fully online courses, to make sure that the courses comply with the requirements of the Assessment office, the Disabilities office, FERPA, General Counsel's Office, Instructional Design Office, IT, & Lord knows what else. Speaking to your earlier point, sometimes it's easier to let the higher-ups create a template, with all of these built in, and then faculty add content on top of the framework, because you don't want the aforementioned busy-body annoying  you.

I wonder how common it is for schools to employ people to do that. Another part of administrative bloat. Can the job be outsourced to developing world employees? Come to think of it, seems like the teaching of these courses could be outsourced too.

My experience is that the enforcement of all these rules is very variable from school to school. (Also the interpretation of what the rules require is variable.)

My plan is just keep on doing what makes sense to me. At some point I guess I will be told that I can't do that, and so I will stop teaching the courses.

[Mercudenton]

Last year I used Google Classroom. This allows you to provide the same assignment to students, who can then type into it. It then automatically creates as many copies as students in your Google folder, with each students' notes in (This makes it different to the standard Google Doc). I assigned handouts on Google Clasroom, students typed into them and I had a record of their notes (which created some measure of accountability for note taking.) However, IT shut down the facility this year saying it was not compliant with FERPA. I asked if I could continue to use it only for handouts (no grades) but they said no. But I know larger universities use it.

I'm curious, is your school a google suite school? My understanding is that the google for education services are FERPA compliant, but the non-education specific services are not.

Yes it is a Google Suite School and I pointed out the FERPA compliance to the people who pulled it. Their answer was that they would need to monitor FERPA compliance on two LMS systems and they don't have the staff. I'm not sure what monitoring goes on, but their answer seemed to me about feeling they could not be responsible for two LMS systems with their resources.

That said I yesterday had a message from someone in learning resources that said Google are launching Google Assignments to live inside the LMS and that this would be available for use soon. It looks like this will incorporate Classroom products into LMS

[dr_codex]

To the OP:

We just got a memo that all courses had to be approved to run in Blackboard. Moreover, any iteration of a course can only be poured from the approved master shell. (I've got some theories about why that particular clause was inserted....) My assumption is that storage outside the LMS would not be approved.

This is only for fully online courses, so far. I assume that hybrid and web-enhanced courses can run in any way, as long as it is FERPA compliant.

We have a mandatory meeting later in the month, required of all online instructors. My feeling is that the compliance and assessment folks are coming.

How annoying for instructors. I guess there's also the question of whether people will actually attend the "mandatory" meeting -- there's a thread on that topic too! I teach just online for one school, and I never go there for any meetings.

I wonder where in the accreditation requirements it says that online courses have to include all their materials within the LMS. Would that be driven by compliance with disability laws? (The irony is that is is often much easier to increase font size and make documents more accessible in Google Docs than it is in Blackboard.)

I also wonder how strict enforcement could possibly be. Are they really going to employ someone to go over every online course and check that it complies with this?

Yes. There's a position that was created about four years ago, at my university, where the person's job is to go through the LMS for fully online courses, to make sure that the courses comply with the requirements of the Assessment office, the Disabilities office, FERPA, General Counsel's Office, Instructional Design Office, IT, & Lord knows what else. Speaking to your earlier point, sometimes it's easier to let the higher-ups create a template, with all of these built in, and then faculty add content on top of the framework, because you don't want the aforementioned busy-body annoying  you.

I wonder how common it is for schools to employ people to do that. Another part of administrative bloat. Can the job be outsourced to developing world employees? Come to think of it, seems like the teaching of these courses could be outsourced too.

My experience is that the enforcement of all these rules is very variable from school to school. (Also the interpretation of what the rules require is variable.)

My plan is just keep on doing what makes sense to me. At some point I guess I will be told that I can't do that, and so I will stop teaching the courses.

Some of this is being done in the name of compliance. ADA especially, although there's a huge difference between "best practices" and actual accommodation of specific students. I raise that here; I'm not jumping into that hole at work, again.

Some of it is being done in the name of Regional Accreditor. Since it isn't happening with bricks 'n mortar classes, there is some skepticism about the rationale. My guess is that online courses are far easier to monitor. The LMS will be mandated for things like the syllabus, course sequence, and grade book for all courses. Several people will quit before this happens. Some of these people are principled, and feel that they are much better positioned to know if a student has mastered course material.

All of it is being done, in my humble opinion, because my administrators are LarryC's objects of study. They appear to think that another policy document or executive memo will prevent all of the bad actors from acting badly. "If only a committee had to sign off on this," they say to me, "it would go on no longer."

Draw your own conclusions.

[polly_mer]

Since I devoted a couple years of my life recently to both overseeing online education and the accreditation compliance, I will provide some perspective from the administrative front lines.

Regional accreditors are cracking down on online education specifically because of some truly egregious cases of courses/programs that provided almost no content and yet awarded credit.  Adams State University went on probation with the HLC for those issues: https://watchingadams.org/news/hlc-places-asu-on-academic-probation/ has links to the evolving story that spanned several years.  Yes, similar situations have occurred with face-to-face classes (UNC comes immediately to mind: https://chapelboro.com/news/unc/unc-placed-on-probation-by-sacs), but the focus is currently on online.

A key policy discussion still ongoing at the US Department of Education concerns the distinction between distance education and correspondence education.  https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/08/08/new-debate-regular-and-substantive-interaction-between has a synopsis of what the distinctions are and why they matter.

I have no personal knowledge about ASU's situation beyond what is available publicly.  However, audits on our own courses and discussions with my peers during the annual regional accreditation conferences indicate ASU wasn't the only one who has instructors who are significantly undereducated in what makes a good online course that is worth the money we're charging students and that keep us in compliance with being distance education, not correspondence education.  I just posted on the QM thread and, oh my, the memories that brings up of what I observed when I started doing course audits and talking with colleagues as part of the peer corps for the accrediting body.  Doing fully online well is very, very different from doing hybrid courses or posting supplemental materials for the face-to-face course. 

During auditing, I've seen very interactive courses that don't meet the 3 hours of work per credit per week for the equivalent of a semester for federal financial aid guidelines because they were all discussion, practically no assignments, and we know the auditors are going to look because this is an accelerated course.  Thus, a student should have been doing approximately 18 hours of work per week for a 3 credit class that is only 8 weeks long and there's no way that assignments + discussions added up to that much time for someone who is as literate as their contributions indicate. 

I've seen fabulous courses that were self-paced with only student-initiated contact with the instructor.  That well-designed course with a reasonable amount of work per week for a diligent student following the suggestions still puts us out of compliance because that's a non-authorized correspondence course, not the distance ed course we had listed.

I've also seen subpar courses that seemed as though the faculty just ignored all the parts of the course that happen in a classroom with human interaction in favor of using the same syllabus with essentially the same assignments.  For example, I saw courses that were actually worse than if someone had just posted a syllabus with reading list/problem sets with answer key and scanned notes from what they would have written on the chalkboard as lecture 1, lecture 2, ..., lecture N.  It wasn't rare to encounter courses with "read this assignment and make one post on the discussion board by <date>.  Respond to someone else's post on the discussion board by <date>" and see discussion boards where the "discussion" was "I really liked the reading.  One interesting fact is <...>"; "That is an interesting fact.  Thanks for sharing!" as the whole assignment for the week.

Posting a good syllabus, but then not organizing the course in any way that looks like the syllabus was also much more common than I naively expected.  For example, I saw more than one course that just had an alphabetical list of links on the front page like 83cwf329_20190519.pdf or newWedlecture.pdf instead of something useful like week4_reading_Smithetal.pdf or organizing by week, unit, or topic with either a useful sublist, folder, or separate webpages. 

As for the accessibility discussion, building accessibility into the course from the very beginning of design just solves so many problems that are much, much worse if we wait until a student files formal paperwork requesting the accommodation in the next week.  For example, the scanned PDF of the photocopied article that someone has been carting around since 2009 does not come across well.  Many of us want a good copy that can be rescaled after download to see the pictures and be able to pick data off the graph.  Many of us want the automatic titles that are part of a modern PDF, especially if we are using an auditory reader or want the hyperlinks to help navigate a lengthy manuscript.

One does not need to be legally deaf or blind to benefit from a transcript or captioning on a video, especially a non-professionally done video where the sound isn't quite right and the camera is shaky so it's not clear where one should be looking or what one should be getting from the video.

One does not need to be legally blind or using keyboard navigation due to physical tremors that make touchscreen or mousing hard to benefit from good navigation design.  For example, link text should be more than one word to give some of us an opportunity to both see the link and select it.  Pulldown boxes that require significant coordination to navigate all the submenus to select the one necessary item are no one's friend.

Thus, I would not be surprised if places with enough resources devoted some resources to ADA compliance and ensuring that anything that's easy to audit is indeed in compliance with everything likely to be auditing.  The old-style way of checking on classes by random selection of syllabus or one-time classroom observation was much easier to Potemkin village if necessary than random draw from the already existing pool.  Oh, and of course, those of us who care about quality of education view checking on online classes like observing an in-person class--something that should be done frequently for new folks to help them acclimate to expectations here and then can taper off once our colleagues are clearly meeting expectations.