e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Berkeley

  • Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    Piazza Makes Three Significant Changes To Deal With Privacy Issues

    For those following the Piazza privacy issues, we have a new update where the company has made three significant changes in their response to privacy concerns from several universities. They are now using true opt-in for their Careers product, they have stopped the practice of using university logos without permission, and they are now offering an easier process to enter into no-cost agreements. For those who have not followed, read here here and here for background. And remember that this case of Piazza’s usage of student data can be seen as a case study on third-party learning apps as we move closer to the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment / LMS as Hub concept.

    Opt-In vs Opt-Out

    In my original post, one of the key issues I called out was that Piazza did not offer with their Q&A platform a true opt-in method for students to choose to allow their personal data to be shared with recruiters through the Careers product.

    What does that opt-in look like in practice? Faculty assign usage of the platform, and during setup students see a pre-checked box labeled “Sign me up” for opting into the Careers service. (more…)

  • University Responses to Piazza: Some good, some bad, some web site changes

    After our reporting from Nov 10 on “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, I was invited by Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar to visit the Piazza offices. During my visit, we had an open conversation where I got to meet pretty much the entire staff and have a direct conversation with Sankar and Sunthar Premakumar. After that meeting, Piazza provided a statement that we published in “Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy”. The statement primarily dealt with a mea culpa from Piazza about working directly with institutions to form agreements around privacy policies and terms of use, including this section:

    We are committed to fixing this. In fact we already have started. We have entered into agreements with Georgia Tech and Brown, and have ongoing engagement with Stanford, UBC and UC Davis[1]. In our conversations universities have been very happy with our policies, practice, and compliance. We are fully committed to entering into contracts with universities that protect students, professors, and the institutions including FERPA, accessibility, and more.

    I have subsequently had conversations with staff from several of the schools mentioned above to verify the information. Some of the responses were good (as in positive review for Piazza and their willingness to work with the school), some were bad, and in parallel I noticed several web site changes that appear to be related to this reporting and follow-up. (more…)

  • Piazza Response To Blog Post On Student Privacy

    Based on Thursday’s blog post “Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data”, Piazza’s CEO Pooja Sankar invited me to meet at their offices Friday afternoon. Given the nature of Thursday’s post, I offered to publish any statement that Piazza had in response here at e-Literate, an offer they accepted. I will defer further analysis for a few days.  – PH

    Update: In the process of making copy-editing changes, we accidentally temporarily removed links accessibility and FERPA compliance documentations. They have been restored to the current draft.

    Sorry about that.

    Statement From Piazza CEO Pooja Sankar

    We at Piazza take our obligations to our community of students, professors, and institutions of higher education very seriously. We cherish and safeguard the privacy of our community. But we made a mistake by not engaging and responding to a way befitting of the trust placed in us. Many of our 1500 Universities reached out quite reasonably to enter into legal agreements for the free service. But as a lean, sub-30 person company without in-house legal, we were overwhelmed with all the (expensive) requests for one-off contracts (for a free Q&A service). We handled it poorly. This unfortunately gave people the impression that we were arrogant. You deserve better. We can do better. (more…)

  • Popular Discussion Platform Piazza Getting Pushback For Selling Student Data

    Update– Please see follow-on posts addressing changes since this post:

    Piazza is a collaborative question-and-answer platform that is “completely free” and can easily integrate into an institutional LMS, or in some cases replace the LMS. In our interviews for e-Literate TV, we have heard several glowing reviews about student engagement increasing thanks to the nature of the collaborative discussions. But in a case study of the aphorism that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”, there are some significant privacy concerns around student data being sold, and several universities are pushing back.

    The source of the dispute is not one of a vendor getting caught selling or sharing data behind the scenes, however. Piazza is quite open about their ongoing usage of student data to generate revenue – in their privacy policy, in their click-through terms of service, and throughout their web site. The source of the dispute is Piazza’s lenient interpretation of privacy concerns and their apparent unwillingness to comply with institutional policies or guidance on student data privacy. (more…)

  • Instructure Dodges A Data Bullet

    Last week’s EDUCAUSE conference was relatively news free, which is actually a good thing as overall ed tech hype levels have come down. Near the end of the conference, however, I heard from three different sources about a growing backlash against Instructure for their developing plans for Canvas Data and real-time events. “They’re Blackboarding us”, “the honeymoon is over”, “we’re upset and that is on the record”. By all appearances, this frustration mostly by R1 institutions was likely to become the biggest PR challenge for Instructure since their 2012 outage, especially considering their impending IPO.

    The first complaint centered on Instructure plans to charge for daily data exports as part of Canvas Data, which Instructure announced at InstructureCon in June as:

    a hosted data solution providing fully optimized data to K-12 and higher education institutions capturing online teaching and learning activity. As a fundamental tool for education improvement, the basic version of the service will be made available to Canvas clients at no additional cost, with premium versions available for purchase.

    What that last phrase meant was that monthly data access was free, but institutions had to pay for daily access. By the EDUCAUSE conference, institutions that are part of the self-organized  “Canvas R1 Peers” group were quite upset that Instructure was essentially selling their own data back to them, and arguments of additional infrastructure costs were falling flat. (more…)

  • Now UC Berkeley and Charles Sturt University Leave Sakai OAE

    Just three months ago, the University of Michigan and Indiana University made a joint decision to “pause investment” in the Sakai OAE project. The latest news is that the University of California Berkeley and Charles Sturt University (in Australia) have also decided to leave the Sakai OAE project. The only schools remaining as part of the Sakai OAE Steering Group are New York University, Cambridge University, and Georgia Tech.

    Ken Romeo from Stanford has an excellent post summarizing the Berkeley and Sturt announcement and resulting community discussions, based on his first-person experience in the early version of OAE. It is worth reading his entire post, but I’ll quote a few key sections.

    (more…)