Security/privacy (8)
This category included terms which outlined the expectation of privacy for faculty, staff and students in distance education communications like email. It also included terms about how that expectation might be limited to protect the security of the institution. Eight colleges had this term in their negotiated agreements and it is a permissive term for bargaining.
Examples
Observations. This is an interesting term, as in most situations, employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy with work email. (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2008). However, unions have been successful in some cases, as illustrated here, in raising the level of the expectation of privacy.
Privacy is not specifically a distance education issue. Generally, all college employees have access to email, regardless of whether they teach distance education courses or not. However, in most distance education settings, the vast majority of individual faculty/student contact occurs via email and other electronic means, as such, is important to include here.