Informed Consent and FERPA Release Considerations
- Harmony Jankowski
Students' electronic consent responses in Terracotta meet the US Department of Education's requirements for e-signature when providing a FERPA release.
First, students' responses in Terracotta are legally verifiable — students are authenticated in the learning management system when they provide their responses, and Terracotta stores the responses, along with the timestamp and context of the responses, in a database with routine back ups and extensive security certifications.
Second, Terracotta meets the requirements of what is presented to students when they provide FERPA release. When consent in Terracotta is collected, it is necessarily on the same page as the consent statement that a researcher’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) approves, and Terracotta expects that your consent statement will "specify the records that may be disclosed, state the purpose of the disclosure, and identify the party or class of parties to whom the disclosure may be made" (34 CFR § 99.30).
It is impossible in Terracotta, by design, to change the consent statement after students respond. So we not only have timestamped response records from authenticated students; we can also construct a record of exactly what students saw in their browser when they registered their response.
Beyond merely meeting the requirements for e-signature for a FERPA release, consent within Terracotta has several of advantages over paper consent/release:
Paper consent/release involves the creation of an identifiable physical record of a student's response. This necessarily introduces loss of confidentiality, as the student's identity, consent response, and their FERPA release are visible to whomever collects and stores these documents (and possibly to the classmates sitting nearby the student). Further, in the case of many studies, the physical documents will need to be read by someone one at a time, and students' names (or other identifiers) manually added to an electronic document to begin the process of data collection from Canvas. This introduces additional loss of confidentiality and potential for error when using paper consent/release.
In Terracotta, consent and FERPA release responses are private. While the consent process is administered in a Canvas assignment, the teacher is never able to see students' responses — the teacher can only see whether a student responded, and when, but not how they responded. Research data exports from Terracotta filter out any non-consenting participants, and consenting students' identities are replaced by anonymous pseudonyms (Terracotta-internal identifiers). To be clear, Terracotta does maintain identifiable records of who provided consent in its internal database, but these are never provided to the teacher.
A key advantage of electronic consent in Terracotta is that students not only have a secure, private means of registering their legally-verifiable consent response; they also have a secure and private means of changing their consent response. In principle, students should have the right to withdraw from a study, but when using paper consent, once consent is provided, significant barriers prevent students from withdrawing their FERPA release. With paper consent, a student would need to keep a copy of the consent statement, contact the researcher, and request to be removed from the study, all of which would be identifiable and likely on vulnerable systems (e.g., email). In Terracotta, consent is implemented as an assignment in the LMS, and if a student wants to change their responses, they simply return to the assignment and submit a new response.
By administering consent + FERPA release in Terracotta, students have longer to read the consent document, and more time to respond. Further, Terracotta registers their response and immediately differentiates the students' future learning activities according to their response — if a student does not provide consent, they immediately receive default/business-as-usual assignment versions. In other words, consent in Terracotta is not only a data collection vehicle, it also allows students who opt out to avoid random assignment, and to avoid having their data included in research data exports without the need for manual entry from paper records.