A Note About Privacy
This orientation course and some of the courses that you will take as part of your degree are designed as ‘connected courses’. There are several reasons for this decision and also several implications for you as a student.
The vast majority of online learning at universities today takes place inside a Learning Management System (LMS). You may have encountered Moodle, Blackboard, D2L BrightSpace, or Canvas at another institution and may be familiar with their structure. An LMS is good for creating course rosters and managing grades or file transfers, but one significant problem is that all of the work that you do as a student then lives in a software system that you do not control. Once your degree is completed (at some universities, right after your course is completed) all of your work is deleted from the LMS. Another problem is that, during the time of a course in an LMS, you and your colleagues will build a certain degree of community and connectedness, but once again, after the course is completed, that community ends because nobody is ever signing in to that course anymore. When the course ends, the conversation ends.
To counter these disadvantages of LMSs, we are running some of our courses in a system called WordPress. Doing this allows you to retain control over your work. When your course or degree is complete, you decide what you want to do with your work. You can export your work to your own domain with a few clicks, you can choose to just download an archive of all your work and save it, or you can delete everything. The key point is that you are in control of your own work.
Furthermore, the community that you develop over the time of a particular course doesn’t have to end, because your connections are not dependent upon everyone accessing the same site in an LMS. Your connections are your connections and they will persist after your course is done, and hopefully well after your degree is done.
One significant implication of this decision is that your work in your courses is open on the web by default. We need to be up front about this because you may have a need for privacy because of where you live, where you work, or other situations where your name cannot be posted on the web. We understand this and are happy to help you protect yourself online. We are going to have you work through some activities to help you determine your level of comfort with sharing your growth on the web, but for now, there are some things that you can do to ensure that your privacy is protected on the web.
- Sign up for WordPress under a pseudonym. You do not have to use your real name on your blog. Just make sure that your instructor knows who you are and what your pseudonym is.
- Use the privacy controls in WordPress to protect your work. You can set passwords on individual pages and posts, or set them to be completely private. Just be aware that your instructor will need to be a user on your blog if you want to use private pages.
- Don’t have a public ‘About Me’ page.
- Go to ‘Settings -> Reading’ and change the privacy settings for your entire site.
To continue, read ‘Scholarship on the Web‘.