5 ms·

I already said it's not about common sense, it's about legal risk. It's about edge cases like someone set up your email to forward all your emails to their acc

I already said it's not about common sense, it's about legal risk. It's about edge cases like someone set up your email to forward all your emails to their account without you knowing. Or other additional situations you could imagine. There is no benefit to not emailing grades directly, from the perspective of Instructure. There is no ulterior motive here. But universities are genuinely risk-averse and their lawyers tell them that not including the grade in the email simply shuts down one more avenue for some potential lawsuit. Which costs money to defend even if a university wins it. This isn't some kind of "dodge". This is literally just Instructure doing what university lawyers demand. I agree with you that the email address is generally always also controlled by the school and has the same login authentication. It doesn't matter. I told you this isn't about common sense. This is about lawyers saying that it could reduce legal risk. And that is a true thing that is coming from real lawyers. Even if you disagree with those lawyers. And Instructure isn't going to try to disagree with lawyers for its own potential customers. It's going to give the schools what they want, which is not revealing grades via email. It's not a "dodge."

ndriscoll 5mo ago
Then the lawyers are incompetent morons. There's "no benefit" to telling the student their own grade at all when viewed from that perspective. You could just not give them any feedback. Or you could allow them to consent to it, which is what the law asks. It is a dodge. Society should not just say "oh those silly lawyers". These people are not being responsible. They are not doing their jobs.
- crazygringo 5mo ago
  No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion. You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.
  - ndriscoll 5mo ago
    The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse. And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law, and are they interpreting it in line with that purpose?" The details don't matter; the outcomes do. Their job is to deal with the details to reach the desired outcomes. If society is better off for putting them on a boat and sending them into the middle of the ocean, then they are incompetent. Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable. It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.
    - crazygringo 5mo ago
      The world is complicated. Laws like FERPA are written with good intentions, but there are a lot of gray areas open to interpretation, and bad actors will take advantage of those gray areas to bring lawsuits for selfish purposes that universities have to spend money to defend themselves and possibly pay expensive penalties over. So lawyers advise how to follow laws in the most risk-free way. Blaming lawyers or Instructure for "failing to contribute to society" is both incredibly immature and factually wrong. It's not the 1980's where jokes about "kill all the lawyers" get laughs. I'm going to be blunt: you seem to have a kind of black-and-white, adolescent understanding of the world where it's split up into good actors and bad actors, and good actors should do what's right (regardless of the law) and bad outcomes are the result of bad actors. But that's not how the world works. Everybody involved can be intelligent and trying to do their best, and we get suboptimal outcomes because this stuff is hard. Writing laws that protect student data while maximizing student convenience are probably never going to get it perfectly right in every situation. But insulting the lawyers or the schools or Instructure as "failing to contribute to society" or insulting the law as "supposedly that stupid" is to deeply misunderstand everything.
- jrumbut 5mo ago
  As someone who transitioned from working in startups and technology to a university, it is hard to describe how different the environment is. It looks very weird and is hard to understand from the outside, and unfortunately all technology vendors are on the outside. Basically every technology has an impedance mismatch when brought into the university environment. And when you combine them together it keeps getting worse. That's why you see things in this thread like CS professors who operate their class using pen and paper and maybe a spreadsheet.
- trollbridge 5mo ago
  I worked with a lawyer who was the on-staff general counsel for a mid size private university who was not an incompetent moron. One thing I really appreciated that she did was refuse to put e-mail disclaimers in the bottom of e-mails, because she said they had zero legal weight and actually were negative from a legal perspective, since it means people might think they have legal weight (when they don't). Overzealous e-mail admins would periodically want to do it because it's what everyone else does, not to mention vendors of frankly B.S. software whose only value prop was adding a disclaimer to all the email that went out of Exchange or Google Workspace.
trollbridge 5mo ago
Have you ever worked in an environment where you were responsible for building systems that complied with FERPA and you worked with your school's general counsel and compliance team on that? What you are saying about e-mail is simply not factual. Student e-mail is inside the FERPA environment, and is considered private to the student. It was designed to be that way. If a student sets up forwarding to go to someone else, that's their problem. The student e-mail uses the same SSO as the LMS, so it's nonsense to act like someone else could have access to e-mail.

ndriscoll 5mo ago

Then the lawyers are incompetent morons. There's "no benefit" to telling the student their own grade at all when viewed from that perspective. You could just not give them any feedback. Or you could allow them to consent to it, which is what the law asks. It is a dodge. Society should not just say "oh those silly lawyers". These people are not being responsible. They are not doing their jobs.

crazygringo 5mo ago
No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion. You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.
- ndriscoll 5mo ago
  The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse. And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law, and are they interpreting it in line with that purpose?" The details don't matter; the outcomes do. Their job is to deal with the details to reach the desired outcomes. If society is better off for putting them on a boat and sending them into the middle of the ocean, then they are incompetent. Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable. It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.
  - crazygringo 5mo ago
    The world is complicated. Laws like FERPA are written with good intentions, but there are a lot of gray areas open to interpretation, and bad actors will take advantage of those gray areas to bring lawsuits for selfish purposes that universities have to spend money to defend themselves and possibly pay expensive penalties over. So lawyers advise how to follow laws in the most risk-free way. Blaming lawyers or Instructure for "failing to contribute to society" is both incredibly immature and factually wrong. It's not the 1980's where jokes about "kill all the lawyers" get laughs. I'm going to be blunt: you seem to have a kind of black-and-white, adolescent understanding of the world where it's split up into good actors and bad actors, and good actors should do what's right (regardless of the law) and bad outcomes are the result of bad actors. But that's not how the world works. Everybody involved can be intelligent and trying to do their best, and we get suboptimal outcomes because this stuff is hard. Writing laws that protect student data while maximizing student convenience are probably never going to get it perfectly right in every situation. But insulting the lawyers or the schools or Instructure as "failing to contribute to society" or insulting the law as "supposedly that stupid" is to deeply misunderstand everything.
jrumbut 5mo ago
As someone who transitioned from working in startups and technology to a university, it is hard to describe how different the environment is. It looks very weird and is hard to understand from the outside, and unfortunately all technology vendors are on the outside. Basically every technology has an impedance mismatch when brought into the university environment. And when you combine them together it keeps getting worse. That's why you see things in this thread like CS professors who operate their class using pen and paper and maybe a spreadsheet.
trollbridge 5mo ago
I worked with a lawyer who was the on-staff general counsel for a mid size private university who was not an incompetent moron. One thing I really appreciated that she did was refuse to put e-mail disclaimers in the bottom of e-mails, because she said they had zero legal weight and actually were negative from a legal perspective, since it means people might think they have legal weight (when they don't). Overzealous e-mail admins would periodically want to do it because it's what everyone else does, not to mention vendors of frankly B.S. software whose only value prop was adding a disclaimer to all the email that went out of Exchange or Google Workspace.

trollbridge 5mo ago

Have you ever worked in an environment where you were responsible for building systems that complied with FERPA and you worked with your school's general counsel and compliance team on that? What you are saying about e-mail is simply not factual. Student e-mail is inside the FERPA environment, and is considered private to the student. It was designed to be that way. If a student sets up forwarding to go to someone else, that's their problem. The student e-mail uses the same SSO as the LMS, so it's nonsense to act like someone else could have access to e-mail.