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“FERPA cannot be interpreted as building a total and complete wall between the school and the community. We would have really bad schools if that happened and very disengaged students.

FERPA was never intended to place students into the box of a physical or online classroom to prevent them from learning from the public. Rather, FERPA requires schools to maintain control over certain student records (Fryer, 2009). These records include medical information, social security numbers, and grades.

Some people think that students cannot release any personally identifiable student information, but this is also not true.

Karen Swan is the James Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield and an expert on online and blended learning.

One study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, did a meta-analysis of 51 reports on online instruction comparing student outcomes in online, blended and/or face-to-face environments. It found that students who took all or part of their classes online performed better, and that the effectiveness of online and blended instruction was broad across variations in students, types of programs and content areas.

Answers from 31,000 students at 58 institutions revealed that even after controlling for age, gender, major, type of institution and number of fully online courses taken, technology use was positively related to categories of engagement measured by NSSE benchmarks (for example, active and collaborative learning and student-faculty interaction), deep approaches to learning and self-reported learning outcomes.