Installation

FERPA compliance

FERPA compliance

by Dick Lane -
Number of replies: 3
At the University of Montana, faculty email to a student about class performance must be sent from the teacher's official university email account and be directed to the student's official university email address.  An individual student does have the option of modifying part of their official profile so that university email address becomes an alias for something else, e.g., a gmail account.

The authorization process on my WeBWorK server creates student accounts with the official university email addresses.  During consultation with our school's legal counsel, I was advised to disable the capability within WeBWorK for a student  to change that record.  Accordingly, I added the following line as the next-to-last line in localOverrides.conf
        $permissionLevels{change_email_address} = 'professor' ;

(defaults.config sets that to 'student', since defaults loads site.conf before doing its thing, making the change in site.conf gets overriden by defaults).


Are there other configuration settings that need careful consideration given FERPA constraints?
In reply to Dick Lane

Re: FERPA compliance

by Hal Sadofsky -

This is a nice idea.  I'm sure our registrar's office would want us to do the same thing.  Have you tested that this has the desired effect of preventing students from changing their email addresses?

-Hal

In reply to Hal Sadofsky

Re: FERPA compliance

by Jim Fischer -
We copied Dick's idea and it works great in 2.7. Our ITS department was very happy as this does make our system more FERPA friendly.

Jim, Oregon Tech


In reply to Hal Sadofsky

Re: FERPA compliance

by Dick Lane -
Although a student still has a link labeled
    Password/Email
the linked page shows

Change Password
Ima Student's Current Password    [text box]
Ima Student's New Password     [text box]
Confirm Ima Student's New Password    [text box]

Change Email Address
You do not have permission to change email addresses.