Moodle

A few comments on this proposal:

IIRC grades are not made available to students automatically (course settings > Show grades).

Teacher feedback: Provided by the teacher for the benefit of the student and would be fairly redundant if the student could not see it. I think we are in different territory with this.

Privacy laws etc. Accepted in full. However, IMO teachers etc. will always keep some type of records about their learners - in Moodle or elsewhere. The issue is one that transcends the medium for capturing records. The nature of records kept and their accessibility is an issue for each organisation in more general terms. If note keeping in Moodle can comply with the wider requirements then that's great, if not it shouldn't be used. No amount of modification of Moodle will impact on the overriding requirements of the jurisdiction etc. So, policy 1st, Moodle 2nd.

Just for the record, my view is there should be nothing in the "general" records about learners that should come as a surprise to them, but it would be naive for me to suggest that all records should be readily accessible to students at all times e.g. where there are legal or pastoral reasons for preventing this.

On a more mundane note: I've not checked this but is it the case that if a users logs in as another and checks an individual's own notes that this would not show up in logs? If this is the case, is it acceptable?

A new capability to allow people to see notes about themselves would be a good addition I think (and help people implement the policy they want). It can default to ALLOW for students even.

Here is my patch. This is my first time adding capabilities, so please check carefully. I think I understand it and it seems to work.

Features:

1. Capability added to view notes written on one's self. Set to true by default.
2. If the user does not have that capability, it is tranparent to them..
3. Sets the risk mask for manage and view of notes to RISK_PERSONAL

For what it's worth, my -1 for setting the default to true.

I believe there is a fairly large minority of users that are in the corporate rather than a purely educational institution arena where this is a non-issue.

I also believe (although not based on research so a big pinch of salt here) there is a major difference between showing a student that asks to see any notes on them (as is his or her right in some jurisdiction) and having said notes available at any time.

A big +1 if the default is that any notes made are only available to the notetaker rather than being accessible to other "teachers".

I agree with all Harry's comments.

It is now possible to disable notes in HEAD.

it is now possible to disable notes completely in 1.9x .

hmm, maybe it would be possible to allow using the notes view capability in personal context too - that way parents could see notes about their children and if needed students could see notes about themselves

I would like to suggest that both students and their mentors (either parents or advisers) would be able to view notes written about them.
The notes feature could then serve as a "progress report". Once at the profile, the student/mentor(s) could see all notes across all courses in one place.

Seems like this issue has fallen off the radar a bit, but it has reappeared here at LSU, so I'd like to weigh in a bit.

This appears to be a FERPA issue in the United States (for educational institutes only obviously). According to FERPA, any part of a student's educational record must be made available to them upon request. This raises a few pertinent questions. First, does adding something to Notes, which are tied to a users' profile, constitute adding to the educational record? I am of the opinion that it does, since Moodle is maintained by the University, but I plan to confer with our Registrar next week in order to ascertain his stance on this issue, as he is the University's FERPA officer. Secondly, according to my understanding of FERPA, private memos or documents that are ONLY available to the instructor are not considered part of the educational record and are therefore not subject to student requests. However, due to the nature of Moodle, site administrators inherently have access to all Notes, meaning that there are truly no documents which are absolute in their availability only to the instructor. Because FERPA allows educational institutions some flexibility in the translation and enforcement of some areas, this may not be a concern for all users, but again, I plan to have this discussion with our FERPA officer to get his judgment on how to handle these situations.

We do have a substantial number of faculty making use of the Notes feature, so the solution I plan to propose to our Registrar next week is two-fold. We would post a FERPA compliance message on the Notes screen stating that all notes are part of the educational record and subject to review by the student upon request. The second part is a bit harder to solidify and will take some discussion before proceeding, but we need to somehow make students aware of the Notes feature so that they will know a) that it exists and b) that they have a right to request access to these documents.

I believe that Mark is correct in stating that there is a substantial difference between allowing a student to request access versus granting access carte blanche. For us, I believe that the former would be the chosen solution, as requests of this nature are normally part of larger proceedings. If anyone in the community has come up with other ideas regarding this topic, I would be most anxious to hear and discuss.