[TOS] the FERPA discussion at Georgia Tech

[Bonnie MacKellar]

Hi,

I imagine many of you have seen Mark Guzdial's post on what is happening with FERPA at Georgia Tech?
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/no-more-swikis-end-of-the-constructionist-web-at-georgia-tech/
It was also blogged at this link
http://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/georgia-tech-goes-nuts-on-ferpa/
Evidently they have had to take down all of their course wikis because the administration has ruled that the fact that a student is enrolled in a particular course is protected under FERPA, and cannot be disclosed even to other students at the university. I am wondering what impact this could have on those of us doing open source projects as part of a course. If a student is interacting on a open source forum, for example, then that student's identity and the fact that he or she is in a course has been disclosed to people not in the course.

Quite honestly, this is something that has concerned me for a while, and was a reason that I had been using our own server as a code repository rather than something like SourceForge or GoogleCode. I always worried that putting student names and, worse, their coursework, out in the public might somehow violate FERPA.

Thoughts?
Bonnie MacKellar
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