What is the Learnics Privacy Policy?

Privacy Policy

Learnics was founded on the belief that data produced from student research contains extremely valuable information that can be used to improve teaching and learning. Learnics provides educators with the data they need to improve learning while maintaining the confidentiality and data security of all students, teachers, and users. This Privacy Policy describes Learnics’ confidentiality practices for information collected through our website (learnics.com) and through our software applications across user devices. Any third parties used by Learnics will be contractually required to adhere to federal and state laws governing confidentiality of confidential data.

Key Points

1. We do not sell or share your data with third parties to advertise or market their services or products to you.
2. We align with federally mandated policies.
3. We do not collect information beyond the Learnics assignment that would compromise you or your students’ private information.
4. We use the data you share with Learnics solely to provide you the Learnics’ service, to improve it, and to keep you updated about new developments. We only use third party services that have made the same commitment to us.

Selling Your Data? 

Learnics does not host or allow any third-party cookies or trackers, preventing third-parties from collecting your information for their own purposes. Firewalls are used to segregate application tiers and provide strict controls on access to resources within our networks. Your data is also encrypted on the servers hosted by our cloud services partners AWS and Google Cloud Platform, which we selected because of their compliance with COPPA, and their stringent security measures.

Unfortunately, in today’s digital age, outages, attacks, unauthorized use, or other factors could compromise the security of user information at any time. Please always practice caution when navigating the internet. In the event of a security breach of our application, we will notify you by posting on the Learnics Website and notifying you by email using the email address on your account within 72 hours of Learnics becoming aware of such breach.

Aligned with Mandated Policies?

This policy is in accordance with the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and outlines our practices world-wide regarding the personal information of all students under 13. For more information about COPPA and general tips about protecting children’s online privacy, please visit OnGuard Online.

User data security and privacy is critical to us and a responsibility that we embrace. We believe that our users’ data should receive the same legal protections regardless of whether it’s stored on our services or on their home computer’s hard drive. We’ll abide by our principles when receiving and responding to government requests for our users’ data.

Collect Other Information? 

The Learnics extensions DO NOT record passwords, usernames, IP addresses, location services, screenshots, any type of “chat” conversations, or any text within the documents that the user opens such as emails, attachments, or websites. Other than student users who answer teacher-generated questions in the app, any type of text or comments that students make in an online site is not recorded or collected.

Learnics solely collects the information outlined in the next section to provide you with a high-quality and secure online learning platform. This includes Google Account information to associate you with your classroom, Learnics files, URLs and time stamps during active logging.

Learnics Data is Only for Learnics’ Services

We collect and use the following information to provide, improve and protect our services for Learnics users:

• Google Account Information
  • To create a unique account for the Learnics Teacher and Student Links, Learnics does require that all users enter their own Google email address to sign on (via Single Sign-On), collecting additional information such as name of school or class and whether they are a teacher or student to assign the user to the correct user group. You can review Google’s Privacy Policy for use of your Google account is available here.
  • Our statement of limited use policy for connecting to Google's API can be found here.
• Learner Activity Data
  • Learnics only collects user online activity data when logging is turned on.  No data is collected when the Learnics Chrome Extension is off. When Learnics' logging is on, browsing history and time spent is recorded in the Chrome Web Browser with the extension installed. Learnics does not collect activity in other browsers without the extension. This record is stored locally on the user's computer and is sent to the Learnics server periodically so teachers can see live progress updates in the teacher dashboard, and again when the students submit their assignment.
  • We want students to know when their data is being recorded by Learnics.  There are three features in place to make sure students are aware that the Learnics extension is turned on:
    • When a student opens a Learnics-enabled assignment from Google Classroom, a pop-up window appears to indicate that recording is beginning.
    • While recording, the Chrome extension turns from gray to red.
    • A blue bar appears at the top of each new webpage that is opened to indicate that a record of that page has been logged.

  • When a student submits a Google Search, Google opens a new URL with the results for the search terms submitted by the student. Since we collect URLs while the extension is turned on, we can determine the search terms that were submitted. Learnics does not record student keystrokes or text typed on webpages.

• Teacher Activity Data

  • Teachers DO NOT have any of their online behavior data recorded. As teachers use Learnics to create classes and assignments, the names of those items are saved by the Learnics Database and associated back to the teacher user.

  • Linking an assignment file from Google Drive requires Google Drive file access, so you will be prompted to accept that permission. This permission grants Learnics the ability to access the link to only the file(s) you choose to add to the assignment. Learnics will never access the contents of any documents or store any documents.

  • Learnics adheres to all Google policies for Learnics’ Teacher Link users. Our software developers use Classroom API to link your Google Classroom to the Learnics extension. While Google is able to read and change your data on Google Classroom, we do not access or store the contents of your assignments, courses, or grades.

  • Information regarding the Google authorization scopes used by our software developers can be accessed here.