Watch out for privacy pitfalls if your school is suddenly online-only

Enlarge / "School" is probably going to look something like this for a whole lot of families in the coming weeks. (credit: Rafael Ben-Ari | Getty Images)

Hundreds of colleges and universities are suddenly shutting their doors and making a rapid switch to distance learning in an effort to slow the spread of novel coronavirus disease. Likewise, hundreds of K-12 districts nationwide have either already followed suit or are likely to in the coming days.

Online education comes with a whole host of challenges of its own, though, especially when everyone's doing the best they can to pull together ad hoc solutions at the last minute. Many of the logistical questions are daunting in their own right: does everyone have a device to use? Does everyone have an Internet connection to use it on? What software tools do we already have that we can use for this? How on earth do we adapt intensive hands-on classroom curriculum, like lab work, for home viewing?

Even when all of the immediate logistical and technical needs have been triaged and handled, though, there remains another complicating factor. While the United States doesn't have all that much in the way of privacy legislation, we do, in fact, have a law protecting some student educational data. It's called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

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