ELearning/Teaching online/Compliance issues
There are three regulatory compliance issues every instructor needs to know and comply.
Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)
FERPA is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. FERPA training is required for all employees with access to student information systems. Click here to view a sample tutorial from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
You can also access a summary of FERPA at the U.S. Department of Education website: FERPA
Section 508, Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
From the Health & Human Services website, “Section 508 requires that all Web site content be equally accessible to people with disabilities. This applies to Web applications, Web pages and all attached files. It applies to intranet as well as public-facing Web pages.”
Practically, this means that all course content must be equally accessible to people with disabilities. There are three primary means by which this can be accomplished:
- Contrasting colors should always be used for foreground (text) and background to ensure readability for the color blind. See Figure 1. Contrasting colors lie opposite each other whereas complimentary colors lie next to each other.
- All photos, illustrations, and other graphical elements presented on web pages should include <alt-text> tags, which are brief descriptions of the graphic, readable by machine readers.
- Audio-visual material should be accompanied by a transcript, or include closed captioning (CC).
Resources can be found at the HHS website
An important distinction between disability issues in K-12 education and higher education and employers lies in the responsibility for initiating contact and requesting services. In the K-12 environment, it is up to school officials to identify disability and accommodation needs and provide for them. In higher education and employment situations it is the student/learner who must declare a disability and initiate a request for accommodation.
You, the instructor, are not responsible for accommodating until you are informed by the student. If you suspect a special need on the part of the student, you can suggest he or she contact the institution's Disability Resource Center or the employer's Human Resources office. They will work with you and the learner to make reasonable accommodations. Once a request has been made, you are then responsible for seeing that the student is reasonably accommodated.
Misrepresentation
Misrepresentation is defined as an assertion or manifestation by words or conduct that is not in accord with the facts. It is a tort, or civil wrong, that can create a civil liability Dictionary definition.
The issue of misrepresentation has recently arisen within higher education through claims by students of some colleges and universities misrepresenting the employment prospects of their graduates. One related action has been the issuance of final regulations clarifying program integrity issues by the Department of Education.
The regulations cover a host of issues regarding the release of information to prospective and current students. Perhaps the most relevant for instructors are “the definitions and provisions that describe the activities that constitute substantial misrepresentation by an institution of the nature of its educational program, its financial charges, or the employability of its graduates” (subpart F of part 668). The regulations define ‘‘substantial misrepresentation’’ as ‘‘any misrepresentation on which the person to whom it was made could reasonably be expected to rely, or has reasonably relied, to that person’s detriment.’’
Suffice it to say instructors should speak carefully when discussing job prospects with students, being sure to make no claims about their future employability.
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