Merging Course / Sections in Brightspace

Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for Merged courses:

When enrolling in a section, students have a reasonable expectation that only the instructor and other students enrolled in the same section can see that they are enrolled in the class. This enrollment status is considered protected information under FERPA. While it is considered appropriate, and legal within the FERPA regulations, for students to know about other students in their own class sections, it is not considered appropriate for that to happen across sections that meet at different times. More…

Note: These issues do not pertain to dual enrolled courses such as EDU210 and HUS210.

Tools in Brightspace that Affect FERPA in Merged Sections

Student Groups Features 

The Groups feature in Brightspace enables interaction between students and this must not be used to enable interaction between students enrolled in different sections.

Discussion Tool

In the Discussion tool of Brightspace, when multiple sections are combined, Instructors must avoid enabling the Discussion Topic option of Open topic (shown below), as this would allow students enrolled in different sections to become aware of each other’s enrollment status.  Enabling Group of section topic would avoid sharing of enrollment status across sections and would therefore be permissible.

Discussion Topic Option

The Open Topic feature of Discussion Forums enables students in different sections to be aware of another’s enrollment.  This is a violation of FERPA and must not be used.

Topic Type for discussions and you need to change the settings to Group or section topic.
How to Set Discussion Setting

Discussion Settings for Merged Courses (New Discussion View)

In order to keep discussions in merged courses (non-cross listed) FERPA compliant, you must apply the following setting in your course to each discussion topic.

  • Go to the Discussions area in the course and then go to “Edit the Topic”
  • Go to the “Group and Section Restrictions” area and then the “Manage Restrictions” area
  • You will see the following options in Group and Section Restrictions:
  • You will want to change this to “Restrict topic and separate the threads”. Once that is chosen, it will default to sections.
  • Repeat for each discussion topic in the course.

How to Request Merging Courses / Sections

If you choose to merge two or more sections of the same course, please put in a Request to Merge Form. It is best to have this process done prior to the load of the new course shells. When classes are merged in Brightspace one of the courses becomes the “Parent” course and the other course(s) are the “Child” course(s). The “Parent” course contains the content that students will see. When you submit your Request to Merge Form, please specify what course you want as the “Parent”. The “Parent” becomes the merged course and all students will be loaded into this course shell.