This interactive, online training course covers the basics of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for all faculty and staff. The training focuses broadly on defining key terms from within the regulations and outlining what actions are required or permitted under FERPA.
The course provides powerful tracking tools that are available within your Learning Management System (LMS), allowing you to check completion rates, pass rates, and particular areas of concern quickly and easily.
Learning Objectives
- Who is and is not a school official
- What constitutes an education record
- What rights FERPA provides
- What is required for compliance
- When disclosures can be made (both with and without prior or signed consent)
- Interaction of FERPA and other federal laws and state laws
Scalability and Utility
Easily install the package in your institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) environment and conduct training remotely. If your LMS supports unlimited concurrently enrolled users, then you can provide foundational FERPA training to your entire campus quickly and easily.
Faculty and staff can train from any place at any time, and you can track results individually or by whole departments. Since the package is deployed locally, you can customize and configure the registration and display options, and even enforce successful completion of the training before employees are permitted to access pertinent student education records.
Course Information
This interactive, online training course covers the basics of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for all faculty and staff. It is designed to provide users with a solid awareness of student privacy issues. The training is intentionally focused on the practical application of FERPA issues on a broad range of campus operations, rather than citing specific sections of the regulations.
This makes the content approachable to people unfamiliar with the law without going into detail that would be unnecessary for them to do their work.
Train any faculty or staff member anytime or anywhere
Student privacy is a shared responsibility on campus. The content of this course was developed with everyone on campus in mind, including: faculty, the admissions office, law enforcement units, financial aid, student affairs, disciplinary bodies, and those within the records and academic services departments.
Train Staff & Faculty
This training course was developed to provide a solid base for FERPA compliance without overloading employees that do not need extensive training. There are two separate ‘tracks’ – one for records and academic services staff, and a shorter one for faculty. It provides powerful tracking tools that are available within your Learning Management System (LMS), allowing you to check completion rates, pass rates, and particular areas of concern quickly and easily.
The training includes both standard definitions and policies, as well as scenarios that force participants to think critically about the application of FERPA. The course concludes with a short, final assessment.
The staff training track takes about 30 minutes or less to complete, while the faculty training track will take roughly 15 minutes.
Customization
The package was designed to be easily customized. If your training requires institution-specific information, such as compliance with state laws or an exhaustive list of items designated as directory information, AACRAO can accommodate those needs.
Tracking and Reporting
The training course provides course administrators with the ability to track individual progress – no additional configuration necessary and information is available in a clear and easily digestible format. Reports are also available for download (Excel CSV or ODS formats), assuming your LMS supports report generation.
Assessment
Once the training material has been covered, students are required to take a 6-question quiz. This quiz requires at least 4/6 answers to be answered correctly in order to complete the course. However, should your institution require more extensive assessment, there is a question bank available.
The training program will inform the user if they are correct or not after they submit their answer in each case, but also goes on to explain why the answer is or isn’t correct, further solidifying the user’s knowledge on FERPA.
What is SCORM?
Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) represents a set of technical standards for e-learning. Courses written to this standard allow content to be interpreted and displayed by Learning Management Systems (LMS) without the need to upload each and every file associated with the course. In addition, SCORM-compliant courses govern course sequencing, user engagement, and objective completion.
In short, SCORM allows courses to be both widely distributed and easily deployed with minimal configuration or staff utilization. For more specific information about SCORM, see the FERPA Training technical documentation.
Compatibility
The FERPA course was built using SCORM 1.2 standards which are compatible with most modern Learning Management Systems (LMS). The course was organized and produced using Articulate’s Rise360 program. Most major open-source and licensed systems on the market that support SCORM 1.2: Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace, Schoology, Cornerstone, TOPYX, Docebo, Litmos, DigitalChalk, TalentLMS, Joomla, Sakai, Dokeos, Totara, ATutor, OLAT, and more. IF your LMS requires an alternative standard, Rise360 can also output in pure HTML, SCORM 2004 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition, and TinCan/xAPI.
Supported Interfaces
This course is fully compatible with HTML5 standards, and has played without issue on every modern desktop and browser configurations tested to date with the exception of configurations involving Internet Explorer 9 or previous versions.
In addition, the course supports the use of mobile devices on the iOS and Android platforms. Users can use touch to navigate through the course and input their answers.
Installation
Uploading the Package and Creating the Course Site
The entire zipped package is approximately 30 MB. The technical documentation has basic upload and deployment instructions for a number of different systems. Once uploaded to your LMS, you need to create a course in which your FERPA training course will ‘play’ and your users can interact with it.
Configuring Playback Settings
The FERPA Training package will automatically scale to fill whatever playback area dimensions are set to. Window size is the most important display option for playback and user experience. Typically, systems will allow at least the following display customizations for SCORM playback:
- In the current window, defaulting to the course’s display settings (100% width, 100% height)
- In a new window, with the SCORM package playing back in a new, resizable window
- In a new window, with a custom window size as defined by an administrator
Registration and Enrollment
The FERPA Training course does not have the ability to register or enroll users. Users must be registered within the LMS and then enrolled in the course where the FERPA Training package has been deployed.
Once a user engages with the package, their inputs will be transmitted to backend tables within your LMS, allowing for specific individual user engagement reports. The technical documentation goes into greater detail, but the following information can be collected either directly through the course administration or within the backend tables:
- User Information
- Attempt history
- Result of attempt (incomplete, failed, passed)
Some LMS’s provide more granular information, such as:
- User input for each touch point in the course
- User answers for the final 6-question quiz
Pricing and Procurement
Starting at $1000
- Unlimited users
- Host within your own system
- No recurring fees
Pricing is based on AACRAO membership and annual institutional expenditure.
For Members:
- Expenditure less than $50mm
$1000 - Expenditure $50mm – $500 mm
$2000 - Expenditure over $500mm
$3000
For Non-Members:
- Expenditure less than $50mm
$1500 - Expenditure $50mm – $500 mm
$2500 - Expenditure over $500mm
$3500
Any other organization that does not directly educate students must pay the full default price of $10,000
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