| | NOV - DEC 20258CANADACANADATECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS THAT DRIVE EDUCATION SECTORBy Jack Suess, VP of IT and CIO, University of Maryland Baltimore CountyBUILDING TRUST IN THE EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE ECOSYSTEM As educational software becomes more critical to instruction, I have seen a dramatic increase in software applications used. Often these applications are bundled with the purchase of electronic textbooks, but other times these are standalone applications that are used across courses. Increasingly, course-based applications are connected to the learning management system (LMS) and are installed as add-ons to the LMS and launched by the individual when they click on a link in the LMS. As educational institutions, we are bound by the Federal government's Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). That requires educational organizations to secure and control how the educational data of our students is used and shared with individuals. In the K-12 space, many districts must also review vendors and software for compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires verifiable parental approval. Finally, many states have established laws or requirements around student privacy and security. At a minimum, organizations are now regularly being audited on how they are managing these requirements. Putting these two paragraphs together, every year, each educational organization has a larger number of software applications where we are required to review the vendor's security and privacy practices to meet audit requirements. What is also true in this statement is that there is a large duplication of effort across our ecosystem, where hundreds or thousands of talented individuals are all doing the same reviews independently. What makes this problem so difficult is how hard it is to get this information. Companies rarely share this information on their public website, and so our employees are forced to work through a chain of individuals trying to pull out the necessary information to review the product. This electronic game of tag can take days or weeks to complete and often requires individuals accustomed to reading legal documents to decipher the privacy policies. This is a problem in search of a community solution, which is where 1EdTech's Trusted Apps and EDUCAUSE's HECVAT come into play. For software applications tied to the LMS and using LTI, 1EDTECH has pulled in people from the community to develop the Trusted Apps Program. This program uses criteria that member educational organizations deem essential and have vendors state whether they conform or not through a certification process. An educational organization can quickly look up a vendor and tell what they do. In the first two years of launching this initiative, they have gotten over 8000 products from hundreds of vendors in the Trusted Apps Catalog. If you visit the Trusted Apps Directory, you will see a list of filters along the right-hand side. From those, you can select the General Filters and select apps based on those that have been vetted. When I did that, I found 8709 apps. Of that number, 605 apps have fully met the Data Privacy Rubric developed by 1EDTECH member. Collectively, for this solution to scale, we need educational institutions to get involved. This effort got a lot of attention when the states of South Carolina and Georgia joined Jack SuessIN MY OPINION
< Page 7 | Page 9 >