Handling data protection and informed consent

[Mira Vogel]

Hello,

There are some things UK Higher Education institutions need to do with respect to BigBlueButton meetings to stay within the 1998 Data Protection Act. Participants need to know that we will not record them without their permission, but that it is technically possible for somebody else to record them. And if we are recording, we need to collect consent, and provide information about the recording.

I'm concerned to:

a) make any declarations sufficiently brief and targeted that they won't be simply ignored;

b) rather than attempting to collect signatures indicating consent, to explore instead whether we can present participants with a declaration which begins something like "By joining this meeting you accept the following terms...", followed by buttons labelled eg 'I accept - join the meeting' and 'I decline - exit';

c) ideally this declaration could be differentiated depending on whether or not the session was being recorded, and would appear as an entry screen with a button to click on to join the meeting - that would help with brevity and eliminating superfluous information about circumstances not relevant to that particular BBB meeting instance.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this, or any relevant experience they could share?

We're using 0.8 integrated with Moodle 2.2, and though we've currently disabled recording we do plan to use it.

Yours,

Mira

[Darren Rickets]

Hi Mira,

I currently work at University of the West of Scotland and we are piloting bigbluebutton via moodle, what we have done is let the module owner decide whether or not to record the lectures by using the option in the setup for bigbluebutton. What we have suggested is that at the link to bigbluebutton that there is a disclaimer stating that these session may be recorded before the student enters the room. However in our experience the student is happy that it is being recorded as it makes more sense to hear the audio with the slides as it makes the revision of the module easier. If students don't want to be recorded then they don't have to speak or use the chat facility. One of the good things about bigbluebutton is that the lecturer can use the partipants section to use as a class register, as you are aware that students have to attend a miniumium of 70% lectures to qualify for their grant.
As for the data protection act our understanding is that as long as no one outside that particular module can get access then it is fine as all data is stored on a secured server and only the administratiors and students of that module can get access.
If you have any further questions about our experiences etc please feel free to contact me.
darren ricketts