The Case for Collecting Less Student Data

Getting a locker at a typical public pool doesn't require handing over your full name, date of birth, and home address at the front desk. And the facility doesn't keep your information on file indefinitely, just in case anyone ever wanted to know who used locker 14 on a Tuesday. That would be an absurd amount of overhead for something as low-stakes as a gym bag and a towel.

No, a public pool handles locker access simply enough: you get a key clipped to an elastic wristband, and that's the entire system—no login, no name on file, no record connecting key 14 to any specific person.

The same logic applies to student data: a lot of software built for schools treats collecting and storing student identity as the default path for allowing access, when it doesn't have to be.

Why Software Collects Student Data

There are a number of reasons why software built for schools might want to use student data, specifically personally identifiable information (PII): a name, a birth date, a home address, email address, or anything else that identifies a specific student.

• Tracking learning. Student online learning often needs to be tracked, whether that's counting how many times they access learning materials, open personalized lessons, watch a video, or take assessments.
• Rostering. Getting students into the right class or groups automatically requires syncing with a district's student information system.
• Default tooling. A lot of analytics platforms record user-level data by default, and product development teams don't always strip it back to only what a feature needs.
• Monetization. If your software is collecting more student data than a feature requires, and that extra data is being retained because it has some perceivable market value, it shouldn't be collected in the first place. Unfortunately, this was not as uncommon as it should have been, until most states enacted student privacy laws to explicitly prohibit selling student data or using it for targeted advertising.

Aside from monetization, these are legitimate needs for student PII. Telemetry, the data a platform collects about how it's being used, such as which features get used, how long a page takes to load, or how often a search filter gets clicked, doesn't require the user’s identity to be useful. The trap is assuming you have to hold that identity data yourself, when often you don't need it at all, or can have someone else hold it for you.

Let Someone Else Hold the Risk

The best way to avoid collecting identity data is to not build a system that would need it in the first place. Google Classroom, Canvas, and Schoology already handle student rosters, identity, and access control at the district level. A platform that integrates with a learning management system (LMS) a district already runs gets the benefit of accessing PII without taking on the work of maintaining it. This was one of the primary drivers for creating the LTI standard: a secure way to exchange student identity within an LMS to a third-party publisher providing an interactive learning experience.

This isn't only a privacy decision. Building for interoperability with an existing LMS is good product practice on its own: it cuts down on the number of logins a student needs to remember and the number of systems a district has to manage. The privacy upside comes along for free.

A Share Code Does the Same Job as a Locker Key

But student data may not be required at all for access, depending on the material. We have employed unique auto-generated share codes on several platforms we’ve built to solve this exact problem: how do you get an online resource to students without asking them to log in, and without leaning on a district's identity system at all? Here’s an example of how we’ve solved this.

Share codes get generated when an educator builds something inside the app and is ready to share it with their students— an activity, a set of materials, an assignment, for example. They take that code and distributes it to students, whether on the whiteboard, in Google Classroom, Canvas or another LMS, or simply asks them to write it down when they read it aloud. Now any student who has that unique share code can open the work directly. There's no student registration and no roster to maintain on the student side. The code is the entire mechanism, the same way the key is the entire mechanism at the pool. It doesn't matter who's holding it, only that it opens the one thing it was made to open.

Why This Matters More in Education

In most industries, collecting more identity data than necessary is a bad habit and leaves consumers leary of the reasoning behind it. In K-12 education, it's a bad idea with legal weight attached. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs how student education records get shared and with whom, and many states layer their own student data privacy laws on top of it, often with stricter definitions of what counts as a student record in the first place.

Every field of PII a platform collects is a field a district has to account for in a data-sharing agreement, a field that shows up in a privacy audit, and a field a parent can ask about directly. Every piece of PII you collect increases your cybersecurity risk. A platform that never collected a student's home address, for example, doesn't need a policy for how long to retain it or who can access it. The simplest way to comply with data privacy rules is to not create a situation where the rule is needed to govern it in the first place.

There's a second payoff. A smaller amount of PII also means less exposure if something goes wrong. Student names, birth dates, and addresses carry consequences that anonymous behavior logs don't: damage to district trust, legal exposure, and media attention.

The Bottom Line

None of this means giving up insight into how students use your tools. Access can work the same way it does at the pool, with no identity needed. We've helped K-12 platforms build telemetry and access systems that are simple by design. If you're evaluating whether your platform needs to collect PII at all, contact us for a complimentary one-hour consult.