School Data Rooms Are Not the Answer to FERPA Compliance

Data rooms at schools have for a long time been a common tool used by schools to showcase and analyze the progress of students. These rooms typically feature whiteboards and charts which display academic data to teachers. The concept is to enable teacher teams and administrative staff to review and discuss student progress in a way that is collaborative.

The issue with these displays is that they may be in violation of FERPA guidelines. These data spaces can be used to humiliate students in front of their peers or shame them publicly. This shouldn’t be happening in schools.

Teachers also have difficulty to monitor student progress when using these data walls, particularly if there are a variety of grades and subjects being tracked. Teachers can work through difficult issues more quickly with a digital system, which allows them to filter by specific assignments, trends, and date ranges. They can also drill down to classrooms and student groups.

Digital solutions may also include an annotation tool, which allows users to make personal notes on any document stored in the system. This is a wonderful feature to keep in mind tasks, questions and answers threads and document uploads. It’s also hugely beneficial should the solution provide an individualized access policy for documents and folders depending on role, document and folder level or activity.

It is vital for schools to discover tools that allow students review and discuss data in a more collaborative manner. Schools can make an informed choice by selecting a solution that offers the right combination of features that will meet the requirements of teachers.

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