Results of Merging to Comply with FERPA Law

Unless the sections/courses you are merging are officially cross-listed by FRC, they will not be fully FERPA-compliant. Here's what users can and cannot do in Canvas:

• Users (students and instructors) can see names of students in other sections in Discussions and see their posts.
• Users can see names of students in other sections in Chat and can see chat posts. 
• Users can see names of students in other sections in Collaborations.
• Users cannot see names of students in other sections in Inbox.
• Users cannot see names of students in other sections in People.
• Users cannot view profiles of students in other sections from Discussion.

Making Courses FERPA-Compliant

To make merged classes FERPA-compliant, instructors not teaching officially cross-listed FRC courses should follow the instructions below after merging their sections/courses:

1. Under Settings - Course Details - more options, make sure that:
   1. Let students create discussion topics is NOT checked
   2. Let students organize their own groups is NOT checked
   3. Hide sections on the People page from students IS checked
   4. Disable comments on announcements IS checked
2. Under Settings - Navigation, disable Chat, Conferences, and Collaboration.
3. Assign Discussions to each individual section using the Assign To option. For ungraded discussions, use the Post to option. Hint: create a separate graded discussion for each section. Graded discussions that are not assigned to a student are not factored into that student's overall grades.
4. If you are creating groups for group discussions, create separate groups for each section. View instructions for group discussions.
5. If you are having students peer review assignments, you will have to manually assign students to review other students in their section only. Canvas does not yet have an automated solution to this issue.
6. When sending a message to two or more students in different sections from the Canvas Inbox, check Send an individual message to each recipient. This sends a separate copy to each student and hides the names of the recipients in the message header.
7. If you are using Canvas Studio and want to allow Comments on a video, post the video separately for each section. 
8. When using Zoom, deliver the meetings separately for each section. If you are recording the meetings, share them separately with students by section.