School Data Rooms Are Not the Answer to FERPA Compliance

School data rooms have for a long time been a popular tool for schools to present and assess student progress. They typically take the form of white boards and charts that display academic information for teachers to view. The idea is to allow teachers teams and administrative staff to easily review and discuss student progress in a collaborative way.

The issue with these data displays however they could violate FERPA guidelines. The information displayed in these data spaces could be used to shame students publicly or even make them feel humiliated in front of their peers. This shouldn’t be happening in schools.

It’s also not easy for teachers to monitor student performance on these kinds of data walls, particularly when there are many different grades and subjects being tracked. It’s much easier for teachers to deal with complicated issues using a digital platform that lets them to filter and drill down on specific assignments, trends, date ranges, classrooms and student groups or cohorts.

A digital solution is usually equipped with an annotation tool that allows users to create personal notes on any document within it. This is a wonderful feature for keeping the track of tasks, Q&A threads and uploads of documents. It’s also an advantage in the event that the solution allows granular access permissions for documents and folders according to the role, the document and the folder level or the activity.

As schools continue to be driven to focus on instruction based on data and assessment, it is vital to find tools that assist them in reviewing and discussing the data in see page a collaborative manner. When choosing a digital solution that offers the right mix of features to satisfy the needs of teachers schools can be confident that they’ve made the right choice.