Only enrolled students and the faculty teaching the course should have access to the course.
However, the CMS administrator also has access to the course to manage and troubleshoot problems in using the CMS. The school must make the administrator aware of FERPA policies.
• If a college uses a hosting client (someone off campus that maintains the CMS), this arrangement makes the hosting client a third-party vendor. While the client should not have access to information that links a student to a grade, the client’s systems administrator does have access to the servers and ultimately to everything on them.
• Students should be able to view only their own grades in the online grade book. They should not be able to see other students’ grades.
• Some issues may arise regarding discussion forums, depending on how the faculty use them. Faculty should not post evaluative comments or grades for students’ comments in the discussion forum. Faculty should also state in the course requirements that students are required to post to the discussion forum, share their papers, and so on.
• If faculty use Excel to keep a record of student grades, they should remove the students’ ID numbers from the spreadsheet, leave no storage devices where others may access them, password protect the spreadsheet (but faculty must remember the password), and use an encryption program that comes with some external drives. This will protect the confidentiality of student data.
• If faculty lose a portable device such as a thumb drive that contains student grade sheets where the student names and grades are identifiable, they must notify the proper college or university authorities to determine what additional action must be taken.
• If faculty require students to send or post information to sites outside the college (e.g., blogs; social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube; etc.), a clear policy must be developed and followed. This type of assignment can be ripe for FERPA violations.
Disability Issues
Distance learning opportunities can open doors for millions of Americans with disabilities. When planning for the delivery of distance education courses, faculty must not create access barriers for the disabled. Laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibit discrimination due to disability, and sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act provide protections to learners with disabilities.67
What constitutes a reasonable accommodation for a particular learner will depend on the situation and the type of program. The accommodation, however, may not be unduly costly or disruptive for the school or be for the student’s personal use only. In colleges and universities, the student has the primary responsibility to identify and document the disability and to request specific support, services, and other accommodations. Most schools have a person responsible for assessing students with disabilities and providing an accommodation letter to faculty. Each accommodation letter details modifications for each student with a disability. The modifications may include the following items:
• Providing extended time to turn in assigned work
• Providing extra time for timed exams
• Administering an exam in an alternative format, such as a paper exam when others will take the exam on a computer through the CMS
• Allowing spelling errors on papers or exams without deduction of points
Given the disability of the student and the nature of distance education, the student may need computer assistive devices. Students with disabilities may need adapted keyboards; magnification software; screen reader programs, such as Job Access With Speech (JAWS) (http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp) or Dolphin’s SUPERNOVA (http://www.yourdolphin.com/products.asp), that convert the text and images to speech; voice recognition; and alternative communication programs. Most operating systems support persons with disabilities by incorporating accessibility utilities into the system.
For faculty, this may mean providing alternative experiences for a student with a disability (e.g., use of a captioned video for the hearing-impaired student). Faculty that teach distance education courses should review the tutorial entitled Ten Simple Steps toward Universal Design of Online Courses (located at https://ualr.edu/pace/tenstepsud/) that addresses these issues. It lists 10 steps and provides examples and details for each one.
Quality
The traditional model of quality evaluation is site based, but distance and distributive education are not site based.68 Distance education is changing the thinking about quality assessment methods. Pond suggests that this new paradigm creates opportunities and challenges for quality assurance and accreditation.69 Pond further suggests that the traditional items of quality assurance, such as physical attendance, contact hours, proctored testing, and library holdings, are impractical or simply not rational in a distance education course. Pond makes the following three suggestions:
• Use a consumer-based means of judging quality much like Amazon or eBay.
• Accredit the learner by having the learner demonstrate competencies rather than earn credits or certify the teacher’s competencies.
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• Move quality assurance toward an outcomes- or product-based model.
This new model will look at quality indicators such as continuity between “advertising” and reality, personal and professional growth of the learner, relevance, and multidirectional interactions.
Eaton states that accreditation institutions or agencies need to do the following70, p. 6:
• Identify the distinctive features of distance learning delivery.
• Modify accreditation guidelines, policies, or standards to meet the needs of this distinctive environment.