It’s hard to think of a time when LeRoy Rooker was not at AACRAO delivering his annual FERPA updates to a packed room of both new and experienced professionals alike. How does the man draw such an audience year after year? No doubt it has a lot to do with his emphatic delivery and dynamic power points, but there is clearly a knowledge gap with FERPA – lots of professionals need to know what it is and how it impacts them, but there aren’t a lot of digestible resources out there. And beyond that, while AACRAO boasts a membership of just over 11,000 individuals at over 2,500 institutions, typically the Annual Meeting draws about a quarter of that number. How do we reach the roughly 75% that can’t get the FERPA goods straight from the expert?
Make FERPA training available online and on demand.
Over three years ago, AACRAO partnered with privacy and security expert Daniel Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University and the Co-Founder and CEO of TeachPrivacy, to develop a training course designed to impart a fundamental understanding of FERPA across a wide variety of institutional departments. Between Professor Solove’s experience with educational software design and delivery and Mr. Rooker’s unparalleled FERPA knowledge, the two were able to create a 60 minute interactive course where learners can watch, listen, and answer questions about FERPA from any place, device, and time.
Once the course was principally finished, AACRAO conducted a pilot program to gain feedback on the course itself and on how to best deliver it. The pilot proved invaluable, not only in determining how effective the training was but also in how we could deliver it to provide the maximum benefit to our members.
University Registrar at Coastal Carolina University Dan Lawless, one of the pilot partipants, said "This course finds the right balance of providing essential information while also being tailored to the broadest possible audience. Installing the module within our Moodle system was quick and easy, and users who undertook the training enjoyed the interface and gained valuable knowledge. We are using this module to provide mandatory FERPA training to every employee at our institution."
AACRAO will be releasing this package as a downloadable file, deployable on your own institutional servers so that training and integration is fully controllable by the appropriate institutional personnel. Please visit https://www.aacrao.org/resources/ferpa/ferpa-compliance-training/ferpa-online-training to learn more about what’s covered in the course, as well as licensing options. As AACRAO moves to a new association management system, new e-learning platforms will be investigated to determine if AACRAO can serve as a host for the program for schools that cannot, for whatever reason, install the course locally.