I am just wrapping up the second of 5 courses for the Digital Curation Certificate at the University of Maine. For some reason, the faculty of this program do not use the university’s official course management platform, Brightspace. Instead, both have been conducted within Slack. I wanted to share what makes this choice so problematic for students and how it puts the institution itself at risk. Most of what I have to say about Slack would apply to any other commercial chat-centric platform such as Discord, Facebook Groups, or MS Teams.
Everything All Over the Place, All At Once
Perhaps one of the biggest complaints about using Slack is that there’s no “home base” or other inbuilt organization to it. Our instructors did create separate channels (chat rooms?) for each week so we could stay on-topic and know where to post our work, but documents we needed to refer to throughout the semester were not together in one place, and announcements from instructors were intermixed with questions and comments from students, creating long threads I had to sift through to find what I needed. There was a “Reference” channel that had links to the syllabus (formatted as a public web page) and other materials, including alternative sources for broken links in the syllabus, and we received weekly messages to our student email with reminders and focus points for that week’s work or discussion topics. That’s a minimum of 3 different platforms to engage with each week.
Assessments were communicated in a combination of weekly comments on Slack (visible to all students), as well as personal summaries delivered by email, another disjointed (and potentially embarrassing) approach to communication. To verify that we had successfully responded to all of the assignments, we were told to use filters in Slack to see our comments, but of course this does not distinguish between original posts, follow-up comments, questions, or responses to peer work. The suggestion to view feedback this way was marginally helpful at best.
A further debacle was that messages older than 90 days are unavailable on the free version of Slack (apparently University of Maine does not pay for this tool even though it is an official communication channel for some classes). So, for example, the handy link to the syllabus that was posted at the beginning of the semester was no longer available on Slack by the time we got to the final project, which was unfortunate because it contained specific instructions for our assignment.
Unlike Slack, Britespace (and other course management platforms like Canvas) are specifically organized to serve these common components of a course. There are designated areas for the syllabus, announcements from instructors, readings, discussions, student questions, assignments, and confidential assessments, all clearly labeled, all on one platform; no expiring messages, no announcements lost in email, and no exposure of individual success or failure as indicated by the instructor’s responses to posts. Brightspace even has a broken link viewer which allows instructors to find and replace broken links in the syllabus before students have to point them out (I found 4 across 2 courses).
Privacy? Legality?
According to Slack, their product:
- Logs the workspaces, channels, people, features, content, and links you view or interact with, the types of files shared and what Third-Party Services are used.
- Collects information about devices accessing the services, including type of device, what operating system is used, device settings, application IDs, unique device identifiers.
- Transfers information outside the European Economic Area, including to Australia, Canada, Japan, India, South Korea, and the United States, to provide, update, maintain and protect our services, websites and business.
I am not a lawyer or legal expert on user privacy, but all of this and other details in Slack’s privacy and data management policies raise questions about how their use of data fits with FERPA, the federal laws that protect student privacy, specifically personally identifying information and sensitive student records. When assignments are evaluated semi-publicly on a platform that has made headlines for its questionable handling of data, particularly in the context of LLM training, I wonder about the repercussions of using this type of technology as a course delivery environment. I am very surprised that University of Maine is comfortable with their instructors using a tool like Slack rather than the course management platform that a) they pay for and b) is designed to guard against FERPA and other regulatory violations.
A Simple Solution
Let me be clear that I don’t believe any of my instructors would intentionally violate school policy or applicable laws; nor are they trying to make the course experience more cumbersome. I am sure that their choice of Slack is directed by the convenience of using a tool like this in other settings. However, it seems to me they have not considered these questions to the degree raised here, and/or they are comfortable with the resulting tradeoffs in a way that I am not.
As I only get reimbursement for 2 courses per year, I am planning to take the summer off from class work. I hope this is sufficient time for the department to reconsider their choices for course delivery and consider moving to the fully authorized and feature-appropriate platform provided by the institution.