Education IT News For VARs — August 20, 2014
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
In news this week, the legal focus is on protecting student data, both at the federal and state levels. Also, Desire2Learn has raised $85 million in its latest funding round, and aims at global expansion, while Chromebook shipments hit 5.2 million this year, in large part due to education orders.
Lawmakers Seek To Protect Student Data
According to this article from Politico, Lawmakers in in both houses have been addressing the issue of the protection of student data. In July, Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced legislation that would withhold federal funds from schools that use or release student records for advertising or marketing and require institutions to protect student data and give parents the right to see what third parties know about their children. Two House subcommittees, one from the Department of Homeland Security and another from Education and the Workforce, recently discussed the risks associated with analyzing and probing student data.
New York Posts “Parents’ Bill of Rights”
This article from Education Week reports that New York has created a parental “Bill of Rights” outlining the use of student data and how that information will be secured on the state education department’s website. The preliminary document, however, which was posted online July 29 as required by state law, is coming under fire because it lays the bulk of the responsibility to protect student data on local school districts. According to a Westchester County, N.Y., Journal News article, all districts must post the parents’ bill of rights on their websites and include the document in contracts with vendors that receive student data.
Kentucky Enacts Data Breach Notice Law
This article from the Privacy and Security Blog reports earlier this spring, Kentucky enacted a data breach notification law requiring companies to alert the state’s residents of unauthorized access to their personal information. H.B. 232 goes beyond typical data protection legislation, however, and contains a separate provision prohibits cloud providers from processing stored student data (defined to include not only information identifying the student, but also “any documents, photos, or unique identifiers relating to the student”) without parental permission for “any purpose other than providing, improving, developing, or maintaining the integrity of its cloud computing services.” The law thus restricts the activities of not only cloud services developed specifically for academic use, but also broadly available free services like Google Docs that are used by many schools.
Desire2Learn Rakes in $85M in Latest Funding Round
Reuters’ reports learning management system provider Desire2Learn has announced an $85 million round of venture capital funding on Thursday, the largest in Canada this year, and one of the five largest in that country in the past decade. The funding will be used for global expansion. Desire2Learn has seen a 40 percent boost in its workforce in the past two years and its Brightspace platform, which serves over 15 million students, has over 900 integrated applications, but CEO John Baker says there are no plans to go public any time soon.
Chromebook Hits 5.2M Shipments This Year, Thanks To Education
The Journal reports by the end of this year, 5.2 million Chromebooks will be shipped, according to a new report by market research firm Gartner, a 79 percent increase in sales from last year attributed to today's robust education market. The company predicts that by 2017 there will be 14.4 million shipments of the device.
For more news and insights, visit BSMinfo’s Education IT Resource Center.