 Student
Online Privacy Notice
E-Mail
Participating in an online course requires you to be able to send and
receive e-mail. Your instructor must be able to correspond with you
through e-mail and may require you to communicate with your classmates
through e-mail. By enrolling in an online course, you are granting the
instructor permission to post your name and e-mail address on the course
website or otherwise distribute that information to other students in the
class.
To participate in an online course, you
need only provide a working e-mail address. It doesn't have to be the
address assigned to you by BSU, nor does it have to be the primary address
assigned by your Internet Service Provider.
Personal Disclosures
Information in electronic form is easily reproduced and easily
distributed. For this reason, you should keep in mind that information you
share in e-mail correspondence, discussion forums, or web pages could be
distributed in ways you did not intend. For instance, if you disclose your
home phone number in an online discussion, another student could copy that
phone number and distribute it to others outside the class. Likewise, if
you use a discussion forum or e-mail to relate a personal experience to
your classmates, expecting it to remain private, it could be copied and
distributed to others outside that group. Therefore, you should exercise
caution in sharing information you would not want made public.
Information About You
With few exceptions, anytime you connect to a computer network information
about you is collected. If you go to the Boise State web site, for
instance, software will automatically log your Internet Protocol address
and the date and time that you accessed the site. If you are enrolled in a
course that uses Blackboard course-management software, your use of the
Blackboard course web site is also logged. Your instructor and Blackboard
administrators have access to such information as the number of times you
logged onto the site, the areas you visited, and the dates and times that
you visited them.
This information may be used in a variety
of ways. One common way is to assist the instructor in making the course
web site easier to use or more useful to students; if students aren't
using certain features or visiting certain areas, the instructor can ask
why and modify the site accordingly. Another common use of this
information is to measure and grade your participation in class, perhaps
by analyzing the amount of time you've spent in certain areas of the site
or by analyzing the quantity and quality of your contributions to online
discussions.
Acceptable Use, Online Behavior, and
Academic Honesty
In many respects, an online class is no different from a traditional
class. In both kinds of classes, you are expected to abide by the
University's policies on conduct and academic honesty. Therefore, you
should familiarize yourself with the Student
Code of Conduct and the University's policy
on the use of technology.
Communicating and interacting with your
instructor and classmates in an online course is quite different from
communicating and interacting in a traditional class. For this reason, you
should also familiarize yourself with accepted conventions of online
behavior (often referred to as Netiquette). Guides to online behavior can
be found at the Netiquette
Home Page and in Arlene H. Rinaldi's User
Guidelines and Netiquette.
Publication and Distribution of Your
Work
Many times, an instructor will publish or distribute student work to
provide an example of a particular approach to an assignment, an example
of outstanding work, or an example of creative thinking. By enrolling in
an online course, you are granting your instructor permission to
distribute your work to others in the course. For example, your instructor
may choose to publish your work on the course web site or distribute your
work in an e-mail sent to all students in the class.
In general, the University recommends that
instructors publish and distribute student work only during the semester
in which the student is enrolled in the course. After that, the instructor
should obtain written permission from the student before publishing or
distributing the work. Federal law prohibits instructors from publishing
or distributing graded work, unless the identity of the student is kept
confidential.
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