EDUCAUSE Review Articles and FERPA

When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can take many different turns along the road to implementing an ideal virtual world for higher education.

The author discusses the need for schools to provide consistent institutional responses to requests for information. Suggestions include establishing a single point of contact to receive compulsory legal requests.

Although advances in social networking technologies allow for new and perhaps more efficient means of learning and communicating, they also pose some significant challenges in higher education, especially for those campus professionals who provide student and academic services.

By adopting a unified approach to information security compliance, higher education institutions not only can effectively satisfy the requirements of the growing number of state and federal laws and industry regulations but also can address identified risks and improve the security of their information assets.

Privacy management in higher education, a uniquely challenging effort, depends on senior management support, strategic partnerships, collaboration, and most important, the necessary skill set and the appropriate organizational placement of the Chief Privacy Officer or other privacy professional.

Higher education in general and IT professions in particular join with all of American society in an attempt to understand the divergent legislative imperatives of privacy and security.