Is Blackboard FERPA compliant?
Here at Blackboard support, we often get questions from faculty and teaching assistants about Blackboard’s compliance with the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal law that governs the privacy of student educational records.
The good news is that the guidelines that protect student privacy in your physical classroom work in much the same way in the online classroom environment provided by Blackboard.
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.
For more information, visit our page on Blackboard Acceptable Use or contact us at blackboard@vanderbilt.edu.