Question: “Which blog provider should I use?”
Answer: It’s complicated.
As an individual question in and of itself this is not a very challenging thought; however when you work for a central non-academic unit like I do, and the person asking the question is looking to implement blogs course-wide as a student journal project it is a different situation entirely. The question is no longer a simple one; it has significant implications that need to be considered.
In the event your school or institution has a centralised blog hosting service the answer is easy. It is always ideal to use onsite hosting. It’s when there is no central hosing service that things get complicated.
First and foremost it’s essential to consult your institution’s guidelines and policies before even considering using a commercial/external provider. This is not a decision to be taken lightly, and some schools may have policies strictly forbidding storage of student data off-site. It’s also wise to consult with local subject matter experts and in some cases legal experts - especially with respect to End User Licensing Agreements.
Particularly in the case of EULA’s, as painful and incomprehensible as they can be to read, it is critical to read the fine print to ensure nothing questionable is included that could have an adverse impact on the course, students, data, an your obligations as an instructor. The Terms and Conditions outline what you and your students commit to when you use the service. They include rights and responsibilities for both user and service provider, and importantly Intellectual Property issues. All of which are important to be aware of.
Above and beyond EULA considerations, the key issues of off-site hosting involve student data, student privacy, and security. Institutions and schools have legal obligations to protect and preserve all of them. So the prospect of storing this information off-campus needs to be carefully considered. Policies and laws will vary from country to country, but the fundamental issues are more or less the same.
In the instance of student data, the significance lay in the protection of assessable material and student work. When a homework assignment is submitted, schools have an obligation - moral if not legal as well - to ensure it is kept safe. For locally hosted services this frequently involves sophisticated and expensive servers, disaster recovery equipment and plans, and IT staff to maintain the environments. The IT people I know take this area very seriously, which is the way it needs to be. Just imagine the catastrophic consequences of losing a student’s thesis or dissertation in a server crash.
It’s always wise to instruct students to store back-up copies elsewhere, and not rely on the online environment as their sole storage location; but this concept isn’t always emphasised or adhered to. It should be.
It’s important to bear in mind too that student data not only refers to preservation of the data, but access to it as well. With a common mandate being the preservation of student records for at least a minimum amount of time, it’s critical that any online service be assessed for the long term availabilities of the information they will contain.
Access to information also refers to service up-time. In this sense preservation of student data refers not solely to what has already been created, but what is currently being created, and even what will need to be created in the future. If you give your students an assignment to write a blog post by a certain date for example, but the blog provider suddenly and unexpectedly has an outage, your students are unable to complete their assignment.
This is not to say there aren’t ways to accommodate these unexpected inconveniences, nor that outages are limited to external providers (they unfortunately happen with school-hosted environments too), but rather that they are important considerations to factor into planning.
With student privacy you deal with a student’s personal details - name, student ID number, grades and marks, even address and phone number. All of this information is highly sensitive. Online applications do take the protection of this information very seriously, but schools take it arguably more seriously - especially when the students are minors/under-aged.
Last but not least we have security, and this relates to all other facets of online activity. Without adequate security you cannot have privacy, or ensure that student data is being preserved and protected. You also cannot effectively create a safe and secure online space in which students feel free to expand their horizons and pursue new avenues in their learning processes. Indeed adequate security is crucial to ensuring the moral and legal obligations of the educational institution are adhered to.
All this is not meant to scare you away from the internet, by the way. After all, the innovations taking place across the World Wide Web provide educators and students with an exceptional amount of potential to design dynamic and engaging learning environments that can truly inspire learning. The flexibility and opportunities in the new web are truly astounding and should be looked towards to enhance and support learning and teaching.
The point is that preservation of student data, privacy and adequate security must take priority above all else. Even the best suited online learning environment should not be used if there is doubt about its abilities to preserve and address these crucial elements.
Here’s the story I keep expecting to go away, but instead it keeps growing bigger and more controversial by the minute.