The guidelines that protect student privacy in your physical classroom work in much the same way in the online classroom environment.
In your physical classroom, FERPA provides guidelines for maintaining student privacy. Blackboard provides a virtual extension of your physical classroom and allows for secure, private, online communication of FERPA-sensitive information in addition to group spaces where students and instructors can interact and exchange information that is not FERPA-sensitive. Restrictions that apply to your classroom teaching also apply in the Blackboard environment, such as not allowing students to see others’ grades or graded work and not using external email to communicate FERPA-sensitive information.
See U.S. Privacy Definitions and Regulations Relevant to Blackboard for additional information.
In regards to course content, faculty adhere to the following:
Course content that does not involve any identifiable student information does not implicate FERPA. Asynchronous lectures depicting only the faculty member, regardless of technology tool used to generate such, would all be compliant and can be distributed through any channel assuming there are no independent reasons for restricting access such as copyright concerns addressed in other materials.
The presumption is that faculty will not have students “appearing” in their lectures, but rather only as ancillary participants through questions or active teaching. It is not “illegal” to capture student presentations or comments in a class and to share recordings with members of that same class. However, such sessions should not be posted publicly on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, or similar social media sites.
In order to stay within the bounds of “fair use” for copyright compliance, access to lectures incorporating unlicensed third-party content such as photographic images and sound recordings should be limited to members of the class and not posted on public platforms.
In regards to recorded synchronous class sessions:
Online synchronized class sessions may be recorded. The recording will capture the presenter’s audio, video and computer screen. Student audio and video will be recorded if they share their computer audio and video during the recorded session. The recordings will only be accessible to students enrolled in the course to review materials. These recordings will not be shared with or accessible to the public. The primary restriction is that the material can only be distributed within the course, and faculty must take reasonable precautions to prevent any broader release. Further, personal information such as grades should be restricted to individual students only.
Students who do not wish to be recorded should:
Change their web-conferencing screen name to hide any personal identifying information like their name or DelVal designated username; and
Not share their computer audio or video during their synchronous sessions